ISTOCK, BATKEIn recent years, scientists have accomplished what previously was saved for miracle workers: they have given blind patients the ability to see better. In 2017, the vision field saw an enormous advance with the approval Luxturna, the first gene therapy to correct vision loss in certain patients with childhood onset blindness.
And just last week, researchers reported that a retinal implant allowed a 69-year-old woman with macular degeneration to more than double the number of letters she could identify on a vision chart.
“It’s early data but very promising, including one patient with impressive vision gains, for a disease where we don’t have any treatment options,” says Thomas Albini of the University of Miami’s Bascom Palmer Eye Institute who was not involved in the study.
What we have is a replica of the cells that are missing, due to degeneration.—Amir Kashani,
University of Southern California
The implant, given to five patients with dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD), is a single sheet of retinal pigment epithelial (RPE) cells derived from human embryonic stem cells. Other teams across ...
