Researchers Develop Dry Eye Candidate Powered by Spinach and Light — The NUS team developed a patented method to extract the thylakoid grana from the cells of the spinach plant and used it as the active ingredient in their eye drops. NUS photo

Researchers in Singapore have developed a spinach-derived nanotechnology that enables corneal cells to produce a key antioxidant molecule when exposed to ambient light.

The team at the National University of Singapore (NUS) says preclinical studies suggest that their approach could reverse corneal damage associated with dry eye disease within five days.

Their work was published online May 15 in the journal Cell.

In plants, the reactions of photosynthesis occur in stacked membranes called thylakoid grana, which produce nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate (NADPH), a molecule that powers antioxidant defenses. NADPH helps neutralize reactive oxygen species (ROS), a driver of the inflammation associated with dry eye.

The researchers call their technology LEAF, for light-reaction enriched thylakoid NADPH-foundry. When their nanoparticle formulation was delivered as eye drops in dry eye rodent models, the corneal epithelial cells rapidly took it up, restoring NADPH levels and corneal tissue integrity within 30 minutes of light exposure.

The supplemented NADPH fueled the antioxidant enzymes to scavenge ROS both within and around the cells, reducing oxidative stress and calming the inflammation that drives dry eye. Similar anti-inflammatory effects were observed in human corneal epithelial cells, the researchers said.

When tested in tear samples collected from human patients with dry eye, LEAF increased NADPH levels roughly 20-fold and reduced hydrogen peroxide, a key cell-damaging oxidant, by more than 95 percent, the researchers said.

“This is an exciting finding, as we have, for the first time, demonstrated that plant photosynthetic machinery can be (introduced) into mammalian tissue to generate biologically useful molecules, powered entirely by the same light that enables our vision,” said Xing Kuoran, PhD, first author of the work. “We, too, can have limited photosynthetic abilities.”

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