The DU Lounge

NNadir

(38,442 posts) Sat Apr 18, 2026, 10:31 AM Apr 18

I will no longer be threatening to punch my good friend LuckyCharms in the eye, because of this finding about pig...

...semen.

Apparently eye trauma can lead to eye cancer:

Head and Eye Trauma Before Retinoblastoma Diagnosis

Apparently, as I learned from my Nature news feed, a treatment for eye cancer being developed relies on material originating in pig semen.

Eye drops made from pig semen deliver cancer treatment to mice:

Subtitle:

Minuscule particles with the ability to cross hard-to-penetrate barriers can be loaded with drug treatments to target intractable diseases.

From the text:

Scientists have used pig semen to develop eye drops that can stop tumour growth in the retina and preserve vision, a study1 in mice shows. The work is published today in Science Advances.

It is hoped that the drops could be developed to treat children with retinoblastoma, a cancer of the retina. The condition is typically treated with injections of drugs into the eye, chemotherapy or laser therapy, all of which can damage non-cancerous parts of the eye. Yu Zhang and colleagues at Shenyang Pharmaceutical University in China wanted to develop a method that could penetrate the barrier around the retina and deliver the drugs without causing any unnecessary damage.

The eye drops contain exosomes — tiny particles released by almost every type of cell — engineered to carry molecules that kill cancer cells. Mice treated with the eye drops showed signs that the tumours had stopped growing. They also had comparable eyesight to control animals without tumours.

The team showed that it was possible for exosomes to penetrate the retina. The technique could improve drug delivery across other barriers that are similarly difficult to breach, such as the blood–brain barrier — to treat conditions including Alzheimer’s disease — or the mucosal barrier, says Chunxia Zhao, a researcher studying drug delivery and nanomedicine at Adelaide University in Australia.

I hope and trust that my friend LuckyCharms is doing well; he's faced some rough stuff in life despite having a great sense of humor.

When he comes back around here - I miss him and his wit - he will be safe from a punch in the eye originating from my fist. Dropping pig semen in his eye is too much for me, even to cure eye cancer, which of course, I hope my good friend never gets.