A vision-restoration company founder explains how they're bypassing dead photoreceptors using gene therapy, electrical stimulation, and neural interfaces. Their Prima retinal prosthesis helped 38 blind people read again in a European trial, with regulatory approval pending.
We started the company. We thought that the time was right to restore vision to patients that had gone blind due to losing the photoreceptors, the rods and cones in their eye. If you want to do that, there's two layers of cells past that in the retina, the retinal bipolar cells and the optic nerve cells. And we weren't totally sure whether it would make sense to stimulate either the bipolar cells or the retinal ganglion cells, the optic nerve cells. But if you could figure out how to selectively drive one or the other with some other— it's of course much more complicated than that— then you should be able to get vision back onto the wire going into the brain at like the first possible opportunity past the dead rods and cones. And we work on, we work on gene therapies. We work on electrical stimulators. We work on these really cool, pretty complicated cell-based neural interface technologies. We're especially excited about the Prima retinal prosthesis, which is getting submitted to regulators for marketing approval. Now we finished a clinical trial last summer in Europe. 38 patients, as far as we know, first time ever that these blind patients have been able to read again. And so not approved yet, but the clinical trial results look really, really great. And we're hoping to have that in like through the regulatory process soon.
