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Partial sight restored in blind man
By AFP Published: May 25, 2021 08:28 PM Scientists have for the first time managed to partially restore the sight of a blind patient by altering his cells, according to the results of a groundbreaking study published on Monday.
A visually impaired student reads Braille during an online class on World Braille Day on January 4 in Surabaya, Indonesia. Photo: VCGThe technique known as optogenetics, which has been developed in the field of neuroscience over the last 20 years, involves genetically altering cells so they produce more light-sensitive proteins.
In some cases of blindness, known as inherited photoreceptor diseases, light-sensing cells in the retina that use proteins to deliver visual information to the brain via the optic nerve progressively degenerate.
GenSight Biologics Announces Nature Medicine Case Report Showing Visual Recovery after GS030 Optogenetic Treatment
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In a First, Optogenetics Leads to Partial Recovery of Vision for Blind Patient
May 25, 2021
When the photoreceptors of the retina the cells that sense light are destroyed, the result is loss of vision. This is how the neurodegenerative eye disease retinitis pigmentosa (RP) results in blindness. A new study reports that a blind patient diagnosed with RP decades ago experienced partial recovery of vision thanks to a novel optogenetic treatment.
The work is the first reported case of functional recovery of vision in a neurodegenerative disease after optogenetic therapy (which controls specific cells through pulses of light, after the cells have been genetically modified to respond to such stimulation). The treatment combined gene therapy encoding the optogenetic sensor ChrimsonR with light stimulation via engineered goggles. Not only might this work help people whose eyesight is very severely impaired, it also lends support to a role in optogenetics in enabling mutation-independent,
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Scientists are making dramatic strides toward a goal that once seemed almost unimaginable: Restoring limited vision to people affected by a previously irreversible form of blindness caused by an inherited eye disease called retinitis pigmentosa.
In a paper published Monday in the journal Nature Medicine, researchers working with the Paris-based company GenSight Biologics SA reported that a 58-year-old man who was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa 40 years ago was able to locate objects placed on a table after receiving an experimental therapy. And New York City-based company Bionic Sight LLC announced in March that four blind people in an early-stage clinical trial are now able to detect light and motion after undergoing a similar treatment. Those results haven’t yet been published.
I hope it will be a major breakthrough,” said José-Alain Sahel, chair of ophthalmology at the University of Pittsburgh and director of the UPMC Eye Center. This paper is a culmination of more than 12 years of work, and I am very pleased to have contributed to this effort with Botond Roska in Basel and all my colleagues at Institut de la Vision in Paris.
Retinitis pigmentosa destroys light-sensitive cells in the retina, which normally help transmit nerve impulses through the optic nerve to the brain to form the images we see. The disease causes mutations in more than 71 different genes, making most gene therapy approaches impractical and ineffective.
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