A British man has become the first person in the world to receive a bionic eye implant that corrects for age-related macular degeneration (AMD)—the most common cause of vision loss in adults. The implant was a success: previously, the patient had no central vision at all; now, he has low-resolution central vision. The operation was carried out at Manchester Royal Eye Hospital; the recipient of the implant was Ray Flynn, aged 80.
The macula is at the back of the eye, in the central region of the retina. It is responsible for all of your high-resolution central vision—that is, when you gaze directly at something, it is the visual receptors in the macula that turn the light that reaches them into vision. With AMD, detritus (called drusen) slowly builds up between the vascular layer of the eye (the choroid) and the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE)—the layer that rods and cones are attached to. If too much drusen builds up, blood flow to the RPE is reduced enough that the rods and cones wither.
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Macular degeneration: 'I've been given my sight back'
Doctors have taken a major step towards curing the most common form of blindness in the UK - age-related macular degeneration.
Douglas Waters, 86, could not see out of his right eye, but "I can now read the newspaper" with it, he says. He was one of two patients given pioneering stem cell therapy at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London.
[...] Doctors have devised a way of building a new retinal pigment epithelium and surgically implanting it into the eye. The technique, published in Nature Biotechnology [DOI: 10.1038/nbt.4114] [DX], starts with embryonic stem cells. These are a special type of cell that can become any other in the human body. They are converted into the type of cell that makes up the retinal pigment epithelium and embedded into a scaffold to hold them in place. The living patch is only one layer of cells thick - about 40 microns - and 6mm long and 4mm wide. It is then placed underneath the rods and cones in the back of the eye. The operation takes up to two hours.
Related: British Man Receives World's First Bionic Eye Implant for Macular Degeneration
Stem Cell Therapy for Macular Degeneration: Conflicting Reports
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 23 2015, @02:56AM
Maybe blood flow?
(Score: 2) by The Archon V2.0 on Thursday July 23 2015, @02:02PM
Don't judge my fetishes!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mendax on Thursday July 23 2015, @04:09AM
I wonder if this guy's eye has a zoom lens like the Six Million Dollar Man. (For you children here, that was a TV series in the 1970's.)
On a serious note, this is great news. I know I fellow who has bad eyesight due to albinism. He's a brilliant coder and is able to function well despite his vision problems as long as he lives in a city with excellent public transportation (which rules out a lot of the United States). He's been looking forward to getting an artificial retina implant some day and that day is looking near!
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 23 2015, @07:22AM
Ask and ye shall receive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoLs0V8T5AA [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Thursday July 23 2015, @09:01AM
I wonder if this guy's eye has a zoom lens like the Six Million Dollar Man.
No reason he couldn't. The implant is actually fed with data from an external camera, mounted on a pair of glasses in this case.
I'm not sure how things work out when his physical eye isn't pointing in the same direction as the camera.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by The Archon V2.0 on Thursday July 23 2015, @02:10PM
> No reason he couldn't.
Except that zoom is useless on a 20x12 camera that appears to downsample to 10x6.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 23 2015, @06:48AM
Wait till you hear of INTEL!