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posted by CoolHand on Monday February 29 2016, @10:52PM   Printer-friendly
from the dreams-of-modern-medicine dept.

An upcoming human trial will attempt to use optogenetics to treat conditions such as retinitis pigmentosa:

In the next month, scientists from RetroSense Therapeutics will inject a virus deep into the retina of legally blind human volunteers. The virus will carry what is perhaps the most monumental payload in modern neuroscience history: DNA that codes for channelrhodopsin-2, a light-responsive protein isolated from algae that — under blue light — activates cells in the retina, thereby transmitting visual information to the brain.

Forget electronic implants. If all goes well, these volunteers will be able to see again using their own eyes — but in no way a human being has ever experienced sight before. Whoa.

But the stakes are even higher: if this works, it means that optogenetics — a revolutionary neuroscience technique using channelrhodopsin-2 and other light-activated proteins — is feasible in humans as therapy. Considering optogenetics has been used in mice to implant false memories, treat cocaine addiction, attenuate OCD symptoms, trigger sexual advances and aggression and reverse motor deficits in Parkinson's disease — just to name a few feats— the technique could completely transform the face of neurology. "This is going to be a gold mine of information about doing optogenetics studies in humans," said Dr. Antonello Bonci, the scientific director of the intramural research program at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, to MIT Technology Review.

[...] If it works, what will the patients see? No one can say for sure. After all, this will be the first time humans experience the visual world through the light sensor of algae. But studies with blind lab mice may give us a hint. In one previous study, after optogenetics treatment, previously blind mice could swim out of a chamber in which the escape route was brightly lit. On average, they escaped as fast as mice with normal vision.


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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 01 2016, @12:00AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 01 2016, @12:00AM (#311833)

    Same AC. The link in the summary is to an editorial about this paper:
    http://www.nature.com/doifinder/10.1038/mt.2011.103 [nature.com]

    They found the "blind" mice and "blind mice with injected photoreceptors" were both slightly slower to reach a brightly lit target chamber than "normal" mice. Then they found that after injecting something supposed to activate the new photoreceptors, the "previously blind" mice got slower at finding the platform. They interpret this as the mice becoming sensitive to light and scared of the bright light.

    This is a strange experiment because the mice with normal vision learned to find the platform faster (ie were not scared off by the light). However, the treatment supposed to restore vision had the opposite effect of making them scared of the light. I doubt they designed the experiment with this result in mind.

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