CU Anschutz explores groundbreaking blindness cure
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University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus researchers are attempting to fine-tune a groundbreaking procedure to cure blindness.
The big picture: Doctors and professors at the Aurora medical campus are working to advance human eye transplantation, a procedure that has been completed before but never successfully restored vision.
Why it matters: The pioneering procedure could signal an unprecedented step toward restoring vision for an estimated 3.5 million people in the U.S. with total blindness.
- No medical or surgical treatments exist to cure blindness, per principal investigator Kia Washington.
The latest: CU Anschutz researchers announced on Monday they would receive up to $46 million in federal funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), a federal agency.
- ARPA-H focuses on advancing biomedical and health research that can't be readily completed through traditional research or commercial activity, per a statement from the medical school.
Context: Restoring vision requires regenerating an optic nerve, which scientists haven't been able to achieve to date, per the American Academy of Ophthalmology.
- Local researchers will attempt to find a way to either regenerate or regrow this nerve and plan to use novel stem cell and bioelectronic technologies to develop the procedure.
What they're saying: "Some would say this is a moonshot — we are shooting for the moon and hopefully we'll land among the stars," Washington said.
What we're watching: The techniques developed to cure blindness could be applied to treat other conditions, including neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, per the medical school's statement.