Iron buildup in the eye is the secret cause of a leading type of blindness in teenagers.
Keratoconus causes the cornea to thin and bulge, but the underlying reason for this thinning was unknown until now. The disease is actually driven by ferroptosis, a form of cell death triggered by excessive iron levels in the eye tissue. This iron overload causes cells to stop dividing and start secreting harmful signals that destroy the eye's structure. Experiments showed that using a common iron-clearing drug called deferoxamine can stop and even reverse this damage. This provides the first-ever chemical treatment for a condition that previously required a corneal transplant to fix.
Iron overload triggers pathological remodeling of corneal stroma through ferroptosis and senescence-associated secretory phenotype in keratoconus
SSRN · 6708191
Keratoconus (KC) remains a leading cause of blindness among adolescents with no available pharmacotherapies to halt its progression clinically. While stromal thinning and cell loss are established pathological hallmarks, the underlying molecular mechanisms driving disease pathogenesis have been poorly understood. Motivated by the clinical presence of the iron-associated Fleischer's ring, we investigated the role of iron overload in KC pathogenesis. Our subsequent analysis of single-cell RNA