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Gene Therapy Causes Blind Woman To Grow New Fovea
Al writes "A woman with a rare, inherited form of blindness is now able to read, thanks to a gene therapy that caused a new fovea — the part of the retina that is most densely populated with photoreceptors — to grow in her eye. The patient suffers from Leber congenital amaurosis, meaning an abnormal protein makes her photoreceptors have a severely impaired sensitivity to light. She received the experimental treatment twelve months ago when physicians injected a gene encoding a functional copy of the protein into a small part of one eye — about eight-to-nine millimeters in diameter. Along with two other patients receiving the same treatment, her eyesight improved after just a few weeks. Now the physicians report that this patient seems to have developed a new fovea, exactly where she received the injection. Because the woman has been effectively blind since birth, the results suggest that the brain is able to adapt to new visual stimuli remarkably quickly."
This is very cool stuff. But in terms of adapting 'remarkably quickly' to visual stimuli after congenital blindness, I'm slightly dubious. There's been quite a bit of recent research done on this recently through Project Prakash (which is also a very cool humanitarian mission at the same time), which finds that adults who regain vision see things very differently than we do... For example that have major problems with depth, object segmentation (think two overlapping squares -- normal observers will typically say there are two squares, overlapping, while newly seeing adults will report 1 square, where the overlap occurs), full field motion etc.
when physicians injected a gene encoding a functional copy of the protein into a small part of one eye â" about eight-to-nine millimeters in diameter.
That's 1/3 of an inch! How many injections did it take to cover that area? Or, is the article so poorly written that the author failed to convey there was just a single injection with the injected material spreading out that far? Maybe we should ask the author directly?
TFA says that instead of fixing what was there, they managed to make a different part of the eye more sensitive. Maybe this treatment might become commonplace one day, to give people better-than-normal eyesight where it's needed.
Could this be used to grow a fovea covering the entire retinal wall, giving us peripheral vision as sharp as central vision?