SEMINAR: Vascular retinopathy: A specific role for IGF-I?

Diabetes affects more than 300 million people worldwide and is expected to affect 500 million persons by 2030. Diabetic retinopathy is considered as a specific microvascular complication of diabetes, and remains the leading cause of blindness in working-aged people. Microvascular changes serve as the basis for the classification of diabetic retinopathy into non-proliferative and proliferative phases. Non-proliferative diabetic retinopathy is characterized by a group of vasodegenerative lesions, such as thickening of capillary basement membrane, pericyte and vascular smooth muscle cells dropout, capillary occlusion and formation of microaneurysms. In the proliferative phase, as a consequence of increasing retinal ischemic-driven secretion of cytokines and growth factors, retinal neovascularization occurs. By means of mouse models we have studied the role of IGF-1, both during non-proliferative and proliferative retinopathy.

Jesús Ruberte is Chair Professor of Veterinary Anatomy at the Facultat de Veterinària, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain. He obtained his Veterinary Degree in 1982 and a PhD in Veterinary Anatomy in 1987. His research interest is Retinopathy in mouse models and he has published many papers in this area.