It’s a weird thought: to cure blindness, inject this algae into your eye… and just maybe it’s viable enough that the FDA thinks so too… Wired.com published an excellent article on the role of channelrhodopsin-2, a light sensitive protein that has been approved for human clinical trials, in the restoration of vision in humans. The article goes on to say:
Chlamydomonas reinhardtii are simple, single-cell green algae that live in water and in dirt. They have a round body, two whip-like tails, and a single primitive eye—not even an eye, really, an eyespot—that they use to seek out sunlight for photosynthesis.
Like human eyes, though, that eyespot makes use of light-sensitive proteins. One of them is called channelrhodopsin-2, and it’s this algal protein, transplanted into the human retina, that could one day restore sight to the blind. And this isn’t just some far-out dream: Last month, the FDA approved human clinical trials for the Ann Arbor-based company RetroSense to do just that.
Take a breath. Yes, this sounds pretty crazy—but not totally voodoo-far-out crazy. Channelrhodopsin-2, you see, is a rock star of the neuroscience world. For the past decade, neuroscientists have been using this protein to make neurons react to light. Neurons don’t typically respond to light—given they’re stuck inside skulls and all—but genetically encode the protein into neurons, and scientists can easily probe brain circuits with light, a technique known as optogenetics.
If channelrhodopsin-2 works in brain cells, why not eye cells? And so RetroSense is planning to use optogenetics in humans for the first time ever, recruiting 15 patients blinded by the genetic eye disease retinitis pigmentosa for its clinical trial. “We are looking to get it off the ground this year in the fall,” says CEO Sean Ainsworth.
The article explains that although gene therapy to cure eye disease is not really a new idea, what is new is using genes from a completely foreign source, “RetroSense isn’t inserting a gene from another human, another mammal, or even another animal, but from an alga. Forget cross-species—this is cross-domain.”
Pretty far out.
Read more about this ground-breaking and promising gene therapy in the original article on Wired.com
Source: Wired.com – “A Cure for Blindness Might Just Come From Algae”
Image Credit: Ami Images/Science Source