Retinal Implant Restores Sight to Degeneration Patients

This new implant makes it possible to partially treat age-related macular degeneration. This disease affects 1.5 million French people and 200 million people worldwide.

A new retinal implant allows patients with age-related macular degeneration (AMD) to partially regain their sight, according to the results of a new clinical trial published Monday, October 20 in the journal The New England Journal of Medicinereports France Inter. This study was carried out by Inserm, Sorbonne University and the CNRS – via the Vision Institute –, the Adolphe de Rothschild Foundation Hospital and the Quinze-Vingts National Hospital.

Age-related macular degeneration affects 1.5 million French people and 200 million people worldwide. It generally occurs after the age of 60 and leads to a progressive loss of vision, specifically a reduction in visual acuity in the central part of the field of vision, that which allows us to read or recognize faces.

The clinical trial was carried out on 38 patients in five European countries and concerned the atrophic form of the disease. In this form, which has so far been incurable, the cells deep in the retina, which absorb light, no longer function. The objective of this clinical trial was to use an electronic implant to replace these dead cells, in order to “restore to the eye its ability to absorb light and generate an electrical signal which will then be processed by the brain”explains to France Inter José-Alain Sahel, ophthalmology researcher at the Vision Institute and the University of Pittsburgh, in the United States.

The Prima system used in this test takes the form of a pair of glasses “on which there are cameras which capture the images” which are then “projected via a micro-projector onto the retina”details the researcher, while “under the retina, we positioned this implant which is photovoltaic, that is to say that each cell absorbs the light which is sent and triggers an electrical signal”.

This implant placed under the retina is a photovoltaic microchip, which measures barely two millimeters, and contains 400 electrodes to send information to the brain. In this study, 80% of patients who received the implant were able to recover some of their vision after a year and read “letters”of the “mots”, “whole pages of books”but were also able to “find your way around the metro”and therefore “recover some autonomy”José-Alain Sahel list.

The results of this clinical trial were sufficiently promising for the company behind this implant to request marketing authorization in Europe.