Recent Scientific Wonder With A Man Partially Recovering His Sight
When science makes the impossible possible, and fiction meets reality, we are thrown into the world of the most innovative and promising scientific advances of our time. A scientist’s wildest dream has come true: a blind man who could barely distinguish light from dark has had his sight partially restored, thanks to an innovative and rapidly developing scientific process — optogenetic therapy (OT).
The 58-year-old man suffered for decades from Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP) — a degenerative genetic eye disease characterized by progressive vision loss, which leads to blindness. Most sufferers start by losing their cone and rod photoreceptors, leaving only the light-insensitive retinal cells (ganglion cells). The latter represent great potential for reconversion into photosensitive cells as they remain functionally connected to the brain, which makes them one of the target candidates for restoring both retinal photosensitivity and visual perception.
A research team in Paris met the challenge of partially restoring vision using a novel technique that combines OT with the use of light-stimulating goggles. The procedure consisted of an intravitreal injection of an adenovirus optogenetic vector encoding the ChrimsonR protein and its amplifier tdTomato, aimed at the ganglion cells in the worse-seeing eye — this was a first-in-humans trial. Visual training was then carried out using goggles, which transform images of the visual environment into monochromatic images projected “in real time as local light pulses onto the retina”.
After seven months of training, the patient went from basic visual acuity to being able to perceive, locate, count and touch one to three objects, even at lower contrasts. Additional neurophysiological evidence proved that retinal activity in the stimulated-eye propagated to the primary visual cortex with effective modulation.
Although this visual perception is partial, monochromatic, and only possible with the use of the goggles, with a small optogenetic activation field, which hypothetically explains the head-scanning strategy as a compensation mechanism, it still represents a considerable scientific advance in OTs for vision restoration. It is also a very promising technical advancement that would deepen our understanding of our adaptive brain. More importantly, science fulfilled its purpose to serve humanity, as this therapy has led to significant improvements in quality of life for the patient and his family.
