Sunday, May 07, 2023

Science Eye prosthesis for patients with serious blindness due to photoreceptor loss

Good news! I rarely directly use a webpage from a business as a source of information, but in this case I make an exception. Also, I was not able to find a good article on this subject quickly.

From the abstract:
"Retinitis pigmentosa and macular degeneration lead to photoreceptor death and loss of visual perception. Despite recent progress, restorative technologies for photoreceptor degeneration remain largely unavailable. Here, we describe a novel optogenetic visual prosthesis (FlexLED) based on a combination of a thin-film retinal display and optogenetic activation of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs). The FlexLED implant is a 30 µm thin, flexible, wireless µLED display with 8,192 pixels, each with an emission area of 66 µm2. The display is affixed to the retinal surface, and the electronics package is mounted under the conjunctiva in the form factor of a conventional glaucoma drainage implant. In a rabbit model of photoreceptor degeneration, optical stimulation of the retina using the FlexLED elicits activity in visual cortex. This technology is readily scalable to hundreds of thousands of pixels, providing a route towards an implantable optogenetic visual prosthesis capable of generating vision by stimulating RGCs at near-cellular resolution."

Science In some diseases like retinitis pigmentosa and macular degeneration, the light-sensitive cells of the retina, the photoreceptors, are lost while the cells of the optic nerve, the retinal ganglion cells, remain.





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