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It s just amazing : How this gene therapy helped a blind man start to see
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A blind man regained partial sight after undergoing a gene therapy known as optogenetics and using a pair of specialized goggles, according to a breakthrough case study published in
Nature Medicine.
According to the
New York Times, the human eye generates images when light hits the retina, where photoreceptor cells convert the light into electrical signals they send to neighboring ganglion cells. Those ganglion cells then use the optic nerve to send those signals to the brain, which converts the information into images.
However, roughly two million people worldwide suffer from a collection of progressive, hereditary diseases together called retinitis pigmentosa in which different gene mutations cause photoceptor cells to die off, eventually causing blindness.
Date Time
AGA welcomes new president John M. Inadomi, MD, AGAF
Bethesda, MD (May 26, 2021) – John M. Inadomi, MD, AGAF, will begin his term as the 116th president of the AGA Institute on June 1, 2021.
Dr. Inadomi, an internationally recognized physician-scientist and beloved mentor in the field of gastroenterology, currently serves as chair of the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Utah School of Medicine. Prior to taking this prestigious leadership role in July 2020, Dr. Inadomi served for 10 years as division head of gastroenterology at University of Washington School of Medicine. Dr. Inadomi’s leadership experience in academic medicine positions him for great success in his role as AGA president.
Adobe
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.