Blog #1: "Company Aims to Cure Blindness with Optogenetics"

This article is about a biotech company that wants to help people who are blind to restore their visions and try to cure blindness with optogenetics. Optogenetics is the combination of genetics and optics to control well-defined events within specific cells of living tissue. It includes the discovery and insertion into cells of genes that confer light responsiveness; it also includes the associated technologies for delivering light deep into organisms as complex as freely moving mammals, for targeting light-sensitivity to cells of interest, and for assessing specific readouts, or effects, of this optical control. The process will be done by providing a gene therapy that will give light sensitivity to neurons that don't posses the light. The attempt will be conducted by an Ann Arbor Michigan based Retro sense Therapeutics company that will utilize the optogenetics. There have been many attempts done by scientist in the last few years to utilize this same process to "study brain circuits and the neural control of behavior by directing neuron activity with flashes of light". The Ann Arbor Retro sense is experimenting with this idea to use optogenetics to treat people with who have lost their vision and not people born blind because those who have lost vision lost it because of a retinal disease that is called retinitis pigmentosa. Retinitis pigmentosa  is an inherited, degenerative eye disease that causes severe vision impairment and blindness. The symptoms of this disease include

• Night blindness
• Tunnel vision (no peripheral vision)
• Peripheral vision (no central vision)
• Aversion to glare
• Slow adjustment from dark to light environments and vice versa;
• Blurring of vision;
• Poor color separation; and
• Extreme tiredness.

So far there has not been any test done to humans to see effectively see if the this new experiment works but however there have been tests done to non-humans and it has been shown to be successful.
Therefore the Ann Arbor based Therapeutic lab will start their first clinical trial in 2013 with nine people that have the retinitis pigmentosa disease.


http://www.technologyreview.com/news/429010/company-aims-to-cure-blindness-with-optogenetics/