UW Scientists, Biotech Firm May Have Cure For Colorblindness

An anonymous reader writes with news about a possible cure for colorblindness. "For the more than 10million Americans with colorblindness, there's never been a treatment, let alone a cure, for the condition that leaves them unable to distinguish certain hues. Now, for the first time, two University of Washington professors have teamed with a California biotech firm to develop what they say may be a solution: a single shot in the eye that reveals the world in full color. Jay and Maureen Neitz, husband-and-wife scientists who have studied the vision disorder for years, have arranged an exclusive license agreement between UW and Avalanche Biotechnologies of Menlo Park. Together, they've found a new way to deliver genes that can replace missing color-producing proteins in certain cells, called cones, in the eyes."

Comments

Why stop there?

[Anonymous Coward]

Men have 2 genetic receptors for color, while women have 3. Women have a broader spectrum because of this. Eagles have 10. If you're going t inject my eyes to reverse my genetic anomaly, go for broke and give me UV to Infrared, don't piss around with just the limited spectrum of a human.

People with artificial lenses can already see UV

[PeterM from Berkeley]

Turns out the biological lens of your eye blocks UV light, but if you get an artificial lens, your retinas can register UV light.

http://www.theguardian.com/sci...

--PM

These licensing deals

[93 Escort Wagon]

This is publicly funded research. It bothers me that faculty and universities - as well as their corporate partners - end up reaping millions (or even billions) of dollars in windfalls based on research paid for on the taxpayers' dime.

At a minimum, these deals should have a clause requiring the amount of public money spent on such research should get paid back from these corporate proceeds before the schools and companies start collecting.

Re:People with artificial lenses can already see U

[bill_mcgonigle]

Turns out the biological lens of your eye blocks UV light, but if you get an artificial lens, your retinas can register UV light.

There's some natural variation. I can see near-UV -- this caused some confusion in high school Chemistry class when I could see some spectrum lines that nobody else could.

I've got the mild form of color deficiency that reduces my total hue resolution from about 10 million colors to about 2 million colors. Maybe my cones register UV better too as a side-effect.

Oh, and I'll happily stick with two million colors if the alternative is a freaking needle in the eye. Eyedrops - let's talk.

Re:People with artificial lenses can already see U

[dex22]

During WWII this was used to advantage by the British. They would use UV lights to flash signals then have somebody at each location who had their lens removed due to cataracts and who could see the UV, which was completely invisible to the healthy Germans that had passed the German medical. This way, they could invisibly pass messages ship to shore and vice versa.

Re:Color blindness is useful though

[Dutch Gun]

Sort of off-topic, but your post reminded me of a little factoid. In Japan, they call the green traffic light "blue". It has to do with the fact that the older term "ao" refers to both green and blue. They have a distinct word for green "midori", but it's understood as a specific shade of blue, and the color boundaries are not the same as what most others would call green. Thus, they have "blue" traffic lights in Japan. They're often the same green as found in other countries, but sometimes they're pushed a bit more towards the blue spectrum.

There is no cure, but there has been a treatment.

[Anonymous Coward]

> For the more than 10million Americans with colorblindness, there's never been a treatment, let alone a cure, for the condition that leaves them unable to distinguish certain hues.

Not ture. For at least 12 years, there have been special eyeglass lenses on the market, which cover at least 2/3rd of all color blindness cases and correct the symptoms well enough to allow the patients work with CAD or Photoshop or drive a car without any risk of misreading the traffic lights and signs.

The problem is, it uses a complicated thin-film technology, which cannot yet be applied to contact lenses, only lens-and-frame eyeglasses, which it presents a vanity problem for wearers, especially since the film gives the lenses a weird hue.

Re:People with artificial lenses can already see U

[Dr_Barnowl]

This was the most reliably citable thing I could find : a medical paper discussing side effects of cataract lens replacements.

http://crstodayeurope.com/2011...

There's the much more readily verifiable fact that red-green colour blindness allows you to see right through various forms of camouflage, and this has been exploited by the military in various settings.

Lots of anecdotes here : http://www.reddit.com/r/todayi...

Re:People with artificial lenses can already see U

[Bearhouse]

Saw something about this in a BBC documentary about the "Atlantic War" in WW2. Funny, I seem to remember them saying that it was the US navy that came up with the idea, (replacement retina operations being more common in the USA at that time)

UVA, UVB, UVC

[DrYak]

Interesting that you mention that - I've never really thought I could see UV, but I have noticed that black lights and UV LEDs have a weird intense brightness that makes me squint even though the visible light isn't that bright, and I can't really perceive a different color.

such things were also reported by people who got caract surgery. Some type of replacement synthetic lens were more transparent in the UV and suddenly people started to see UV. (Some replacement were way too much transparent in the UV and could damage the eye by not protecting it enough).

Germicidal lamps don't cause the same effect for me.

Both are "UV" in the sense that they are above the violent band. But they're not the same wavelenght.
Blacklight UVA: is just slightly above the the violet band, with wavelenght shorter than 400nm
Germicidal Lamps UVC: is way above the violet band, with wavelenght around 280nm (e.g.: around wavelenghts most likely to be absorbed by DNA and other critical biological structures - thus damaging the germ cells).

Cones can detect UVA (it's just usually blocked by the eye's len).
Cones cannot detect UVC (and would probably just die if exposed to it).

Re:People with artificial lenses can already see U

[jc42]

Turns out the biological lens of your eye blocks UV light, but if you get an artificial lens, your retinas can register UV light.

There's some natural variation....

This has been understood for some time. As others have mentioned, various military orgs have used teams with varied color vision as a way of "seeing through" camouflage. Biologists have suggested that the variety in human color vision is adaptive, giving our hunting ancestors' teams an improved chance of spotting spotting prey against various backgrounds, and the addition of dogs (with their very different color vision from ours) improved this teamwork. This is all hypothetical, though, since (as far as I know) it hasn't actually been tested scientifically.

Back in high school (in the 60s), I had a science teacher who did a good illustration of it all. He made the usual demo of a spectrum using a prism, on a sheet of white paper. Then he had students come up and mark the visible ends of the spectrum, covering up each student's marks with another sheet of paper before the next student made their marks. The result was two columns of dots that didn't line up at all; their variants was around 10% of the width of the spectrum. I'd made marks that I could identify, and saw that my UV mark was right at the average point, while my IR mark was one of the farthest out. This explained some things I'd already noticed about the ways that different people saw colors.

This has been known to the photography industry since color film was first produced. Different varieties of film (and now CCDs) have different sensitivities, and different photographers have different preferences for brands of film based on this.

One of my funny personal anecdotes on the topic was once (in Jr High, as I recall), I asked some visitors why the front-left panel of their car was a different color than the rest of the car. They gave me a funny look, then said the car was all black, which everyone else present agreed with. I objected that only that one panel was black; the rest of the car was a deep red. This got me more funny looks, and the fellow who owned the car said that the car had been in a minor accident that damaged the front-left panel, so it was replaced. After that, my family thought I had something called "black-red color blindness" (which is odd, because I was actually the only one without that defect ;-). I was taken to an optometrist, who verified the "condition", but assured my parents that it wasn't a significant problem, and didn't need treating. Actually, there was a simple treatment: glasses that block near-IR light, and I've accidentally got several sunglasses that do just that, making for oddly muted reds.

As I got more into photography, I eventually noticed that my eyes have slightly different color vision, with things looking slightly bluer in the left eye and slightly redder in the right eye. This seems to be extremely common, actually, though most people don't notice it until it's mentioned and they start trying to spot it in different lighting condition. (Hint: It's often easier to spot in lower-light conditions, and difficult in full sunlight.)