Blindness

Cataracts are one of the most common forms of vision impairment, and unfortunately surgery is the only real treatment. But the clouds may be parting on a new drug treatment, improving the vision of the majority of mice it was tested on.

Although many of us may have forgotten about Google Glass, the technology is now the base of a set of glasses designed to assist the blind. Known as Envision Glasses, they utilize AI to verbally tell their wearer what they're looking at.

If diabetes progresses too far, it can result in a potentially blinding condition known as retinopathy. And while existing treatments are invasive and often painful, there may be new hope in the form of an LED-equipped contact lens.

There may be new hope for people with certain types of blindness, as an experimental sight-restoring device has been deemed safe for implantation. It still has to be tested on humans, though, and it will likely provide a rudimentary form of vision.

While there are already eye implants that allow the blind to see simple patterns, Spanish scientists have recently had success with a different approach. They bypassed the eyes, producing perceivable images by directly stimulating the visual cortex.

In a major breakthrough for regenerative medicine, scientists have partially restored vision in a blind man using an emerging technique called optogenetics, which enabled the patient to locate and identify objects for the first time in decades.

A team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has engineered a novel type of scaffold that could give efforts to tackle vision loss a boost, by improving the precision with which replacement photoreceptor cells can be delivered into the eye.

Autonomous vehicles and robots navigate with sensors and cameras – but visually-impaired people still get by with canes and guide dogs. Now, engineers have developed a wearable AI system that tracks obstacles and describes a person’s surroundings.

Spanish researchers have created a new potential treatment for age-related macular degeneration, which is currently untreatable – a biohybrid artificial retina, made of silk and loaded with new human cells that can integrate and repair the damage.

One of the ways scientists hope to offer better treatments for vision loss is through gene therapy. Researchers have been left surprised by an experimental form of this, which involved an injection into one eyeball yet improved vision across both.

A new gene therapy treatment may be able to save the vision of patients with a blindness-causing genetic disease. DOA currently has no preventative or cure, but in tests in mice and human cells the team was able to slow progression of the disease.

In some forms of blindness, certain parts of the eye still work but damage to light-sensitive cells disrupts vision. Now, researchers have used gene therapy to bypass damaged cells and restore partial vision to mice that were completely blind.