New research from the lab of MCB Professor Richard Kramer shows that a new therapy "could help prolong useful vision and delay total blindness" in humans with deteriorating vision. The treatment, which has been successful in trials with mice, utilizes drug or gene therapy to reduce interfering noise generated by nerve cells in the eye. Reduction of this noise can improve vision for those suffering from vision loss, including common age-related macular degeneration.
“This isn’t a cure for these diseases, but a treatment that may help people see better. This won’t put back the photoreceptors that have died, but maybe give people an extra few years of useful vision with the ones that are left,” says Kramer.