A drug first approved in the 1950s to treat high blood pressure may offer new hope for people with a rare, inherited eye disease that causes blindness.
Researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have found that reserpine, a drug no longer used for blood pressure due to side effects, may help protect vision in people with retinitis pigmentosa.
Retinitis pigmentosa is a group of genetic disorders that damage the retina—the part of the eye that senses light.
It often begins in childhood and can lead to total blindness.
The disease can be caused by more than a thousand different mutations across over 100 genes, making it difficult to develop a one-size-fits-all treatment. Right now, no cure exists.
But researchers at the NIH’s National Eye Institute, led by Dr. Anand Swaroop, discovered that reserpine might work regardless of which specific gene mutation a person has.
In their new study, published in eLife, they tested the drug on rats with a genetic mutation commonly found in Irish Americans with retinitis pigmentosa.
They found that reserpine helped preserve the function of rod photoreceptors—the cells in the retina that allow us to see in dim light.
The team was especially encouraged to see that the drug helped the photoreceptors continue sending light signals to the brain, a process called phototransduction.
Surprisingly, the protective effects of reserpine were stronger in female rats than in males, and the drug also helped protect cone photoreceptors, which are responsible for color vision in bright light.
This isn’t the first time reserpine has shown promise for retinal diseases. In 2023, Dr. Swaroop’s team reported that it could slow down vision loss in another inherited eye condition, LCA10, caused by mutations in the CEP290 gene.
Since reserpine is a small-molecule drug, it’s easy to deliver directly to the eye at very low doses, which minimizes the risk of the side effects that made it fall out of favor as a blood pressure treatment.
Dr. Swaroop’s lab is now working on developing newer, more effective drugs based on reserpine that could offer long-term protection or delay vision loss while patients wait for more advanced treatments like gene therapy.
If these findings hold up in human trials, reserpine or similar drugs could become a powerful new tool to help people at risk of losing their sight to inherited retinal diseases.
Source: National Institutes of Health.
