"Many diseases are caused by injury or inflammation destabilizing blood vessels and causing them to leak fluid into adjacent tissues as well," study senior author Dr. Dean Li of the University of Utah School of Medicine in Salt Lake City said in a statement.

"We found a natural pathway -- the Robo4 pathway -- that counterattacks this by stabilizing blood vessels."

This discovery has significant implications for developing drugs that activate Robo4 to treat age-related macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy," said Li's colleague, Dr. Kang Zhang, who collaborated on the research. However, the researchers caution that getting new drugs to market would take a number of years.

Dr. Randall Olson, director of the John A. Moran Eye Center at the University of Utah, called Li's finding historic.

"This is a major breakthrough in an area where the advances have been minimal," Olsen said. "We are excited about taking this opening and moving the frontier forward with real hope for patients who have but few, often disappointing, options."

The study was published online in Nature Medicine.