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General => Open Discussion => Topic started by: piggy on May 04, 2010, 04:59:12 AM

Title: Restoring sight to the blinds
Post by: piggy on May 04, 2010, 04:59:12 AM
Vid: http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=4738923

Research Paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/102/17/6177.full.pdf

A gene therapy treatment which may increase both cone and rod photoreceptor-based vision is on clinical trial as we speak.

6 children and young people have taken the therapy and so far there is no any notable side effects was noticed.
Title: Re: Restoring sight to the blinds
Post by: Tangled-Universe on May 04, 2010, 11:34:38 AM
Very interesting of course, but as you can read it is only specific for a certain type of blindness, caused by a mutation in the RPE65 gene.
This mutation causes a loss in photoreceptor function, but not causes photoreceptor loss by retinal degradation, which is common in many other types of blindness.
So yes, this is definitely promising, but not applicable to all kinds of conditions which cause diminished eye-sight.