World Sight Day: No More Darkness? Cure For Blindness in Sight

On World Sight Day, we look at two experiments by Indian scientists which have brought us closer to curing blindness.

It’s World Sight Day – an annual day of awareness held on the second Thursday of October, to focus global attention on blindness and vision impairment.

As you read this line a remarkable thing is happening.

A stream of light from the words you’re reading is bouncing into your eyeballs and falling on the photo-receptor cells on the retina. This visual information is transmitted to the brain as a kind of code, where it is reconstructed to make up the letters in this sentence you are reading right now.

So while your eyes do most of the heavy lifting of sight; you actually “see” with your brains. But a lot can go wrong between the eyes and the brain.

Of the 37 million people who are blind in the world, 15 million are in India. Most of them lose vision with diseases of the retina like macular degeneration. And there’s little that can be done for them. But now, thanks to an explosion of new research by Indian scientists across the world, blindness might be off the market in the near future.

For now, read about three cutting-edge, experimental treatment that even five years ago, would have been unthinkable.

1. Stem Cell Therapy

It was a eureka moment for Hyderabad’s eminent eye surgeon, Dr Sayan Basu when he found a reservoir of stem cells in the area of the eye behind the cornea which could be transformed to potentially reverse blindness. This was a part of a joint research between India’s LV Prasad Eye Institute and the Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

Dr Basu then implanted more than two lakh cultured stem cells in blind mice, and discovered that in a month’s time, some of these cells integrated smoothly with the local eye cells to restore sight.

But this exciting finding has to overcome big obstacles. For starters, scientists will have to coax the ability of these stem cells to turn safely into specialized cornea cells that transmit light rather than become cancerous.

After fixing this hurdle in a laboratory environment, Dr Basu is conducting a pilot clinical trial on 10 blind patients in Hyderabad. The results of these will be available by December this year.

Who Will Benefit: If all goes well, then this technique will restore vision to 2 million people with corneal blindness in India. Right now, a majority of these patients wait for years for a transplant; there are only enough corneas available for 10,000 to 20,000 people each year.

The patient who receives a cornea transplant then faces long post-surgical follow-up care of life-long medications and a small chance of rejection. The stem-cell procedure is non-surgical and requires only a mild anesthetic. It also greatly reduces any chance of rejection.

2. The Bionic Eye

The retinal implant that allows the blind to see via electrodes and a mini camera, has been successfully implanted in a 80-year-old blind Britisher. The patient can now see his family members, watch Manchester United on television, something he hasn’t done from the past eight years.

And now if the technology has got you impressed, then chew this: the patent to the bionic eye lies with Dr Rajat N Agarwal, a scientist of Indian origin at the University of Southern California, who first made this device in April, 2011.

The device has not yet been used on Indian patients because of the high costs; the device alone costs, Rs 22 lakhs, minus the hospital and surgical costs.

Now watch what it’s like to be among the first people in the world to get a bionic eye:

3. Gene Therapy

Macular degeneration is a condition of the eye, which starts with vision disappearing into blind spots and eventually everything fades to a dull, grey haze.

Researchers at Oxford University discovered that by replacing a missing protein gene into the retina, they can prevent cells from degenerating. And now that replacement protein has been found in algae.

Now algae, has an ‘eye-spot’ that makes use of light-sensitive proteins. In laboratory experiments, this algal protein restores 80% vision in mice. And it’s no far-out dream now, last month, the US FDA approved human clinical trials for it.

Who Will Benefit: Macular degeneration is incurable right now. There are no exact statistics available in India, but doctors estimate, more than half of the blind population above 60 suffers from it.

The real takeaway from all of this is that we are eliminating human blindness. For all of history we haven’t been able to do anything about it and now we have three working solutions being tested in different parts of the globe.