Eyes on prize: Visionary device gives hope 20-year high-tech project aims to restore sight, boost quality of life By Eva Wolchover Sunday, March 9, 2008 - Updated 2d 3h ago E-mail Printable (1) Comments Larger Smaller Text size Share (5) Rate A bionic device the size of a pencil eraser - the labor of 20 years for a group of visionary Hub doctors and scientists - is offering hope that some forms of blindness could be alleviated within a few years. The Boston Retinal Implant Project, partially based at the V.A. Medical Center in Jamaica Plain, is one of 22 programs around the world working to restore vision to the degenerative blind. Their work: a bio-electronic implant that delivers images to the brain via a connector the width of a human hair. "There has been this explosion of interest in this field because basically the technology in the last 20 years has become miniaturized enough and sophisticated enough so that for the first time we can imagine building something small enough to put in the eye," said Dr. Joseph Rizzo III, who founded the project in the late 1980s and co-directs the 36-member team. Click to learn more... Rizzo, who is director of neuro-ophthalmology at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, teamed with the V.A., MIT and a handful of other institutions to create the implantable retinal device. The aim is to restore partial sight to people who have slowly gone blind because of degenerative diseases of the retina. Roughly 2 million Americans suffer from age-related macular degeneration, which is the leading cause of blindness in the industrialized world. Some 1.6 million people worldwide have retinitis pigmentosa, the leading cause of inherited blindness in the world. More than 20 years along, the retinal project is entering its homestretch. An FDA grant application is in the works and the team's first human surgeries will take place in the next few years. In its simplest terms, the device, which is implanted behind the retina at the back of the eyeball, works as a light transmitter. Only patients who were once able to see and have partially intact optic nerve cells are eligible for the procedure. People who are blind from birth or suffer from glaucoma are not. Joined by doctors, scientists and engineers from multiple disciplines, including neurologists and software engineers, Rizzo has co-directed the program since 1988 with John Wyatt, professor in the electrical engineering and computer science department at MIT. "Assembling this thing is really hard," said Wyatt, whose team of MIT researchers and engineers is responsible for designing and testing the implant. "It has got to be waterproof, vapor-proof and very tiny. It has got to last for 10 years or more in the eye." Saltwater has a corrosive effect on non-biological materials, so the implant has to be both delicate enough to hug the eye and strong enough to withstand corrosion. "We have one that sits and works now in a dish of saltwater," he said. "The one to last indefinitely should be ready sometime this summer. We expect to plant it in an animal this summer." The team hired a metal specialist based at EIC Corp. in Norwood to design a corrosion-proof titanium casing for the implanted chip. "One of the neat things about our implant is the whole device sits on the outside of the eye, except for a tiny strip" of plastic, he said. "So it doesn't invade the eyeball." Rizzo said the implant will not restore perfect vision, but will provide patients with a sense of their surroundings - to detect shapes and obstacles in their pathways. Ideally, Rizzo and his team say, patients will someday be able to recognize objects, faces and general detail. "The thing is to significantly improve the quality of life for blind patients," said Rizzo. "What level of achievement that would actually be is hard to know. The idea of not having to use the white cane - to walk around, find the sidewalk, not run into a telephone pole, not walk into a car. Being able to navigate safely in an unfamiliar environment, that's the big topic." He hopes the prosthesis will one day restore a patient's ability to recognize faces and expressions. But for now, he said, restoring a patient's confidence and ability to move about is a major step. To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe.
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