playground: some good news.
I googled Rita Levi Montalcini and "gocce" (which means drops) and a whole lot of super interesting stuff came up.
There are SEVERAL studies going on right now using NGF as a way to cure retinitis pigmentosa AND ocular tumors.
The type of drops used are "rhNGF", aka recombinant human nerve growth factor.
Another study involves rhNGF for ocular tumors.
Another to repair the cornea.
Im going to past the related links here, you can google translate, a whole lot of information is in these articles, at the moment i am about to head out but i will search for more stuff later and translate what i can.
http://www.galileone...rare-la-cornea/
http://www.galileone...ite-pigmentosa/
http://www.galileone...lla-montalcini/
http://www.iapb.it/news3.php?id=2044
One of the articles is from April 2015, as you can see, so we have very recent stuff and some of the studies mentioned are about to end and the results will be published (one is supposed to end in November 2015).
What i found here is just about the eye so far, apparently Rita started taking the drops for some issues with her eyesight and later realized the drops could reach the brain and improve her neuronal capacity (probably butchering the terminology here).
I alwo wonder about the difference between rhNGF and NGF... which is not clear to me.
Excellent, good work Asor!
In which article does it says this:
"Rita started taking the drops for some issues with her eyesight" ?
Is it that Rita is quoted as saying that she started the NGF when she had problems with her eyesight ?
Or is it ... that.... some journalist is giving a summary ?
Does the same article (or any article) tell us when when started having problems with her eyesight ?
You've said here that she started taking the eye drops, and then subsequently realised that
the NGF could reach her brain.
"Rita started taking the drops for some issues with her eyesight and later realized the drops could reach the brain"
So this means that there must be two dates involved:
1) The first date is when she first learned that NGF eye drops could help with failing eyesight.
2) The second date is when she found out that NGF could reach the brain via eye drops.
Presumably, you wouldn’t put NGF into your eyes unless there was some
experimental evidence to suggest it would work, right ?
So, the first date must have been after the date when research interest in treating retinal
problems with NGF began.
My search through google suggests that this date is approximately 1989.
(However, a more thorough search might easily find earlier dates)
In 1996, her friend and colleague Dr Aloe, performed his own studies into this.
So definitely by 1996, at the latest, Rita knows that NGF can help with failing eyesight.
However, those studies were in vitro, or via injection.
The first NGF eye-drops study looking at repairing retinal nerves was (surprisingly recent) in 1998.
In the first published study about the application of
NGF-eyedrops [172], severe corneal ulcers associated
with anesthesia (corneal neurotrophic keratitis) were
treated with purified mNGF.
source: http://www.translati...5876-10-239.pdf
What is reference [172] ? It's this:
172: Lambiase A, Rama P, Bonini S, Caprioglio G, Aloe L:
Topical treatment with nerve growth factor for corneal neurotrophic ulcers.
N Engl J Med 1998,338:1174–1180
This suggests that Rita started on the eye drops sometime after 1998.
The second date is when the first studies are published with radioactively labelled NGF.
You put radioactively labelled NGF into the eyes of mice/rats/rabbits and then
sacrifice them two hours later to see where the NGF went.
Metagene's NGF-eye drops patent details experiments of this kind with rabbits.
However, the patent describes the experiment, the results, but doesn't cite any references. :-|
Here's the patent pdf for anyone that fancies trying to track down this study: (search for the string '[0044]')
https://docs.google....EP1948217B1.pdf
(It might possibly have a date on it earlier than 2005)
However, i do have a date for the discovery that NGF eye-drops would pass to brain areas
behind the eye. It's 2005.
Recent studies reported that NGF can be safely delivered into the brain by nasal
(Chen et al., 1998; Koevary et al., 2003; Di Fausto et al., 2007) or
ocular administration (Lambiase et al., 2005; Di Fausto et al., 2007;
Lambiase et al., 2007; Lambiase et al., 2009),
souce: http://www.ncbi.nlm....les/PMC4146309/
What is this Lambiase et all (2005) reference ? It's this:
http://www.ncbi.nlm....pubmed/16186366
They used radioactively labelled NGF to see if it had entered the optic nerve
behind the retina. And of-course, it had.
So it looks like the second date is 2005 (or slightly later)
Probably the patent study with the rabbits probably came after the finding that NGF
was diffusing into the optic nerve
The summary is:
It looks as if Rita started on the NGF eye-drops in or after 1998 and before 2005.
So... Rita must have been 89 years old, or in her early 90's, when she started
on the NGF eye drops.
This is long way from my original understanding, which was that she started the
eye-drops 40 years ago, in the mid 1970's.
Also note that this 1998 date is after the date when human recombinant NGF (rhNGF)
became available. This (arguably) suggests that she was using human, not mouse NGF, (mNGF).
Let's not forget, that no Pharma company has gone to market with rhNGF eye-drops.
Genentech abandoned stage 3 trials because they encountered "toxicity".
Playground.
Edited by playground, 06 June 2015 - 04:52 PM.