58years old man regain is sight after 4-decade
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.
As earlier reported in Nature medicine journal on 24th of May, 2021, this marks another breakthrough and advancement in clinical application of optogenetics.
In the report; the clinical trial was tested by a France based company with the name GenSight Biologics. They enroll people with retinitis pigmentosa a degenerative disease that kills off the eye’s photoreceptors cells. This cells are the ones responsible for the first step in visual pathway.
Also stated in the report; “The researchers injected the virus into the eye of a man with RP, then waited four months for protein production by the RGCs to stabilize before testing his vision. José-Alain Sahel, an ophthalmologist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in Pennsylvania and leader of the study, says that one of the challenges was regulating the amount and type of light entering the eye, because a healthy retina uses a variety of cells and light-sensitive proteins to see a wide range of light. “No protein can replicate what the system can do,” he says. So the researchers engineered a set of goggles that captured the visual information around the man and optimized it for detection by the bacterial proteins
Using a camera, the goggles analyse changes in contrast and brightness and convert them in real time into what Sahel describes as a ‘starry sky’ of amber-coloured dots. When the light from these dots enters a person’s eye, it activates the proteins and causes the RGCs to send a signal to the brain, which then resolves these patterns into an image.”
As at the moment,the man is not able to see without the goggle but with time, proxima to 2years after training with the goggle, chances are that he will recover his sight.
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