Blindness

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.

Scientists in Australia who have spent more than 10 years developing a first-of-a-kind bionic vision system are now eyeing human trials, with the hopes that it could one day help restore vision in those suffering from untreatable blindness.

Scientists working towards next-generation treatments for blindness have made an exciting breakthrough, demonstrating how a new method of injecting healthy cells into the eyes could act as a one-two punch to address vision loss.

Impressive new work has demonstrated a potential way to restore vision in those suffering from degenerative diseases of the retina. A single injection of nanoparticles was found to create a working artificial retina, restoring vision to blind rats.

An international team of scientists has developed technology that could detect diabetes-induced blindness in its early stages, using a smartphone as the basis for a low-cost diagnostic method that could greatly improve care in developing regions.

Scientists in the UK have been putting an AI to the test for diagnosing glaucoma, with the results of the trial indicating it can pick up on progression of the disease 18 months earlier than current methods.