Botond Roska and José Alain Sahel (President of the IOB Scientific Advisory Board) published an invited review article in the prestigious science magazine Nature on "Restoring Vision”. It provides a summary of the first successful operations on blind patients, the current state of therapies and the challenges they present, model systems, technologies applied, and the clinical prerequisites for new methods to help in the battle against blindness.
The article may be found here
Restoring vision to the blind by retinal repair has been a dream of medicine for centuries, and the first successful procedures have recently been performed. Although we are still far from the restoration of high-resolution vision, step by-step developments are overcoming crucial bottlenecks in therapy development and have enabled the restoration of some visual function in patients with specific blindness-causing diseases. The review discusses the current state of vision restoration and the problems related to retinal repair, new model systems and translational technologies, as well as the clinical conditions in which new methods may help to combat blindness.