When people talk about eye diseases, most people often think of cataracts, glaucoma, etc., but in fact, there is a highly blinding eye disease that is ignored by people, which is uveitis. At present, there are more than 3 million uveitis patients in China, and the world's largest uveitis diagnosis and treatment center and uveitis patient sample bank is in Chongqing.
On December 21, the upstream reporter walked into the Chongqing Key Laboratory of Ophthalmology of the First Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical University to reveal for you what the largest uveitis patient sample bank in the world looks like.
▲The sample manager takes the sample out of the refrigerator
▲ In each test tube, there is a 0.8 ml whole blood sample
Test tubes are placed in a -80 °C refrigerator
The uveal membrane is the middle layer of the eyeball wall, and once this membrane has a problem, it will cause serious complications and sequelae such as cataracts, which is one of the main causes of blindness, and it will recur after the disease.
On the afternoon of December 21, outside the uveitis sample bank of the Chongqing Key Laboratory of Ophthalmology of the First Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical University in Building 5 of the First Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical University, researchers wearing white coats opened a heavy iron door after entering the password, and inside the iron door were placed several metal boxes that were more than one person high against the wall - ultra-low temperature refrigerators.
The chests look inconspicuous, but they are a treasure trove of this laboratory. In this sample bank, there are more than 33,000 uveitis samples of whole blood, serum, aqueous humor, iris, etc.
Open one of the metal boxes, a huge air-conditioning rushed in, in the thick ice, is a small box of neatly stacked sample cryopreservation tubes, and the metal box holding these samples, in essence, is a "big freezer" with ultra-forced cold effect, according to the sample library administrator, "in order to ensure the quality of the samples, the temperature of each refrigerator is strictly maintained at minus 80 ° C or minus 180 ° C." ”
Wearing thick gloves, the librarian removed a cryoprex from a neatly arranged cryopreserved cassette, which was only the size of an adult's little thumb, and in order to avoid the effect of repeated freeze-thaw on sample quality, the whole blood samples of each patient with uveitis were divided into several tubes, 0.8 ml per tube.
Here, there are not only whole blood samples of uveitis patients, but also more than 33,000 samples of serum, cells, iris and other related uveitis samples.
Whole blood samples from patients with uveitis provide a valuable resource for research into the precise diagnosis and treatment of uveitis. On this basis, the laboratory has been built into the largest uveitis genetic resource bank of an international single institution. Using these resources, in-depth research on uveitis immunity and genetics has been carried out.
▲Professor Yang Peizeng (middle) led the team members to do the experiment
More than 12,000 people are admitted every year
It seems that each blood sample is only a little bit, but it brings great research value to the diagnosis and treatment of uveitis. In the laboratory downstairs of the sample bank, researchers are using pipettes to aspirate the relevant reagents to perform western blotting experiments on the blood of the samples proposed from the sample bank to study the response of magnesium ions to proteins in the blood of patients with uveitis.
This is the latest research project of the ophthalmology laboratory, the director of the laboratory, known as the "first person in the diagnosis and treatment of uveitis in China", Professor Yang Peizeng introduced, he led the team in the daily research found that in the blood samples of uveitis patients, magnesium ions on the cells, immune system, etc. the impact is different from ordinary people, "If you can find the role of various ions in the patient's body, it may have new help for the diagnosis and treatment of the disease." ”
Yang Peizeng and uveitis have been dealing with for more than 30 years, along the way, he led the team to discover and propose a theoretical framework for the occurrence of uveitis, revealed the key immune mechanism of uveitis at the immune level, and found 79 genetic variants related to uveitis at the genetic level, of which 29 genetic variants related to VKH syndrome, accounting for 80.5% of the world's discoveries. In terms of clinical research, Yang Peizeng's team found and summarized the common types, characteristics and blinding laws of uveitis in China in this key laboratory of ophthalmology in Chongqing, and mapped the clinical spectrum of uveitis in China, laying a foundation for the formulation of scientific prevention and control strategies.
At present, more than 12,000 uveitis patients come to Chongqing from all over the world for treatment every year, and the Department of Ophthalmology of the First Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical University has become the largest uveitis diagnosis and treatment center in the world. Yang Peizeng will go to the outpatient clinic every week to remove the pain of the patient. And each patient left them a huge "sample wealth" to inject vitality into the treatment of uveitis.
Upstream journalist Shi Heng