A Blind Patient Regained Partial Sight in a Breakthrough Study, Offering Hope to Millions

The darkness descends slowly for people with retinitis pigmentosa (RP), a degenerative eye disease that affects 2 million people worldwide. The condition is typically diagnosed in childhood or adolescence, but it can take until middle age before a person’s vision has deteriorated severely enough that they are fully or effectively blind. When the lights finally do go out, however, they stay out. Or that’s the way things used to be. In a breakthrough study published today in Nature Medicine, investigators report a relatively simple yet remarkably effective way to restore partial vision to RP patients—one that, with further study, may soon have wide application. The key lies in the rod-shaped photoreceptors that principally govern peripheral vision and the cone-shaped receptors that give us our central view of the world. In people with RP, mutations in more than 70 genes cause slow deterioration of the rods, leading to tunnel vision, and later the cones, leading to blindness. Light still streams into the eye through the unaffected lens, and that light could still make its way to the brain via the optic nerve. But the retina, which lies between the two, no longer works. A team of researchers, led by Dr. José-Alain Sahel, professor of ophthalmology at Sorbonne University and the University of Pittsburgh, however, thought they might have a way to bring the retina back into the game: ChrimsonR, a protein that opens electrical channels in neurons and makes t...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized embargoed study Innovation Source Type: news