SO9. New Hope For Patients With Neurotrophic Keratopathy: Molecular Interactions Governing Nerve-mediated Control Of Corneal Epithelial Renewal And Wound Healing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE: Corneal clarity, essential for vision, is maintained by limbal stem cells (LSCs), which generate transparent limbal epithelial cells. Corneal sensory nerves, beyond their protective role, are believed to stimulate LSCs via unknown mechanisms. Neurotrophic keratopathy (NK), caused by absent corneal innervation from congenital or acquired etiologies (e.g., tumors, trauma, infections), leads to blindness. Corneal nerve-associated Schwann cells (SCs) play a crucial role in wound healing and epithelial maintenance. Our scRNA-seq studies suggest that several trophic factors secreted by SCs regulate LSC activity, identifying pleiotrophin (PTN) as a novel SC-derived regulator of corneal renewal, particularly when combined with ciliary neurotrophic factor (CNTF). METHODS: In our two NK models, either local ablation of SC or surgical corneal denervation causes corneal ulceration and prevents healing of experimental corneal ulcers. To define the role of PTN in corneal epithelial renewal, we tested the effects of topical recombinant PTN alone or with other trophic factors on the healing of surgically denervated or genetically SC-ablated deepithelialized rodent corneas. RESULTS: (i) PTN alone induced rapid healing, and, (ii) when applied together with (CNTF), induced complete recovery of corneal clarity. CONCLUSION: Under conditions of denervation or SC loss, exogenous PTN with CNTF rescue corneal epithelial renewal. These findings will be leveraged towards the development of topical treatments for NK.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".