Last Updated: Milestone : Scientists Partially Restore Blind Man s Vision With ’gene Therapy’
“It’s a big step for the field, neurobiologist Flannery said. Most important thing is that it is safe and permanent, he added about blind man s vision.
IMAGE: NATURE JOURNAL
In a first, scientists in Europe and the US have been able to partially restore the eyesight for a blind man who suffered photoreceptor disease nearly 40 years ago. Employing the technique known as optogenetics, which involves altering cells such that they manufacture the light-sensitive proteins, scientists were able to get the vision back for the 58-year old patient. Now, he can recognize people, do the counting, locate and touch different objects.
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After 40 years of blindness, a 58-year-old man can once again see images and moving objects, thanks to an injection of light-sensitive proteins into his retina.
The study, published on 24 May in
Nature Medicine, is the first successful clinical application of a technique called optogenetics, which uses flashes of light to control gene expression and neuron firing. The technique is widely used in laboratories to probe neural circuitry and is being investigated as a potential treatment for pain, blindness and brain disorders.
The clinical trial, run by the company GenSight Biologics, headquartered in Paris, enrolls people with retinitis pigmentosa (RP): a degenerative disease that kills off the eye’s photoreceptor cells, which are the first step in the visual pathway. In a healthy retina, photoreceptors detect light and send electrical signals to retinal ganglion cells (RGCs), which then transmit the signal to the brain. GenSight’s optogenetic therapy skips the
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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.
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Somewhere in Paris, in a white room, seated at a white table, a man wearing a headset reminiscent of those worn by VR gamers reached out with his right hand and placed his fingers on a black notebook. This simple motion, which he executed with confidence, was notable for one very important reason: The man had been blind for close to four decades.
What was different now was that as part of a clinical trial, genes had been injected into one of his eyes, causing neurons in the retina to produce a light-sensing protein normally found in the slimy bodies of green algae. When the black goggles he was wearing projected video images of his surroundings as a pulsed light beam onto those now-light-sensitive cells, the neurons fired, and the signal traveled up the optic nerve and into the visual processing center of the brain. The genetically modified neurons had become stand-ins for the photoreceptors he had lost many years before to a genetic disease called retinitis pigmentosa.
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