Cure Blindness: Reverse Eye Aging | MOONSHOTS

We have a drug candidate that came out of my lab, and I want to give big credit to my student, Wancheng Lu, who worked for many years to try and find certain genes and combinations that could safely reverse aging, but not go so far that you could cause cancer or lose identity of the cell. And he found it. It took a long time. He found 3 genes, 3 of the Yamanaka genes, a subset of them. These Yamanaka genes, I think you all know, are what we use to make stem cells. But we don't want to use the technology to make stem cells. If I turned you all into a giant lump of stem cells, that would not be good. And mice die within 2 days if you use all of Yamanaka's genes. So anyway, we have 3 of the genes. We call them OSK for short. They're going into the eye of a patient shortly to see if we can cure blindness, having succeeded really well in mice and monkeys to cure their blindnesses.