One of the most promising medical advances that 2025 left was the one that allowed blind people to read again thanks to an ocular implant. Although this solution is still several years away from leaving the laboratory and generally reaching clinics, it is the first time that a prosthesis of this type restores sight to patients with incurable blindness.
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The results of the clinical trial of the Prima Project – the name with which this feat was baptized – were published in October in the journal The New England Journal of Medicine. Far from being the end point of the research, this publication that went around the world marks just one stage of the process: its authors are already working on the next trials and new versions of the implant, with which they hope to achieve other promising advances in 2026.
EL COLOMBIANO spoke with Daniel Palanker, professor of ophthalmology at Stanford University and one of the three scientists who led the study. Sitting in his office in California, with a white board in the background covered with inscriptions that, when zoomed in on the video call, look like formulas, the doctor in Applied Physics explains what the more than twenty-year process was like to develop the chip that could become a solution for one of the most common causes of blindness in the world.
This is macular degeneration, a disease that affects central and detailed vision, which is what allows us to read or recognize faces. “It affects the macula, which is why it is called macular degeneration. The macula is the center of the retina, and the retina is the innermost layer of the eye, where all the light reaches. The cornea and the lens allow the passage of light to the retina, which is responsible for receiving it and sending it to the optic nerve so that it reaches the brain and thus we can see. The macula is what gives us the ability to perceive colors and sharpness, and it is precisely what is “is affected by this disease,” explains Andrea Hoyos, an ophthalmologist specializing in retina who did not participate in the research.
The particularity of this type of degeneration is that its main risk factor is age: it is one of the main causes of blindness worldwide, and the most common in people over 60 years of age. It is believed that there are currently 200 million people with this disease that until now has no cure and it is projected that by 2040 the number will reach 288 million.
This is where the research developed by Palanker comes in. To restore vision to those who have lost it due to macular degeneration, a tiny wireless chip is implanted in the back of the eye and high-tech glasses with a small camera are used, which captures images and projects them in real time, using infrared light, to the Prima chip. This, in turn, converts them into electrical stimulation, fulfilling the function of the photoreceptors – the retinal cells responsible for detecting light and transforming it into electrical signals that the brain interprets as images – which were damaged by the disease.
“The idea of a retinal prosthesis based on a photovoltaic array – that is, a wireless implant powered by light – arose in 2005, about 20 years ago, and since then I have tried to develop it with my research group. It took us about seven years to obtain a proof of concept: build the chips and test them first ex vivo (outside the organism) and then in animals, specifically in rats.
By 2013 we already had very convincing animal data. That same year, a French group led by José-Alain Sahel, in Paris, founded Pixium Vision, a company that licensed our patents and began marketing the chip and taking it to clinical trials. The first patients were recruited in 2018. The first phase, called the feasibility trial, included five patients in Paris, who were followed for five years, until 2023.
Since the results were very positive, the company began a second phase for approval in Europe, with 38 patients. This trial, known as a pivotal or phase 3 trial, began in 2023 and the first year’s results were obtained in 2024. These findings were recently published in the New England Journal of Medicineas you already know,” says Palanker.
That last trial you mention involved 38 people over the age of 60 from Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands diagnosed with geographic atrophy, an advanced form of macular degeneration. All of them were implanted with the Prima chip through a procedure that lasts approximately 80 minutes, known as vitrectomy, and which the Stanford professor explains as follows:
“In this surgery what we do is remove the vitreous in front of the retina, then we inject fluid under the retina and this lifts it. Then we make a small cut in the peripheral retina to be able to inject the chip under the retina. You slide it towards that blind spot right in the middle of the macula.
And the retina is reattached by injecting a heavy fluid, technically known as fluorocarbon. And after bonding, the surgery is basically over. “Patients are allowed to recover after surgery for maybe a couple of months and then they come to the hospital to adjust the glasses and start using it.”
It took exactly four to five weeks for the patients in the trial to start using the glasses, and then several months of training were needed for them to achieve greater visual acuity. Of the 32 participants who completed the one-year trial, 27 were able to read again thanks to this 30-micron-thick implant, which, to give you an idea, is thinner than a strand of human hair, which can measure up to 100 microns.
During the year-long trial, patients used the chip for everyday tasks such as reading books, food labels, and subway signs. One of the most recognized testimonies was that of Sheila Irvine, a British woman who participated in the study and who, due to geographic atrophy, lost the ability to read, her favorite pastime. Something similar happened to Alice Charton, a retired teacher living in Paris who was devastated after spending a lifetime teaching children to read in school, only to lose her vision and not be able to do it herself.
“Another patient I spoke to recently is an architect from Italy, and he is back to work thanks to our system. So, he told us that he is using AutoCAD, an architectural software, and that now when he looks at the computer screen he can see his designs. He is currently working on the final adjustments of a church in Rome, so that is incredible,” says Palanker.
Although other ocular prostheses have already been developed with the aim of treating blindness, these have only managed to provide patients with sensitivity to light, but not functional vision. This is the first time that an implant allows people who had lost their sight to see, which represents an exceptional achievement in scientific research and development in recent decades in this field. There are several investigations that Palanker remembers that have been carried out in the last twenty years with the same objective.
“At the time, when we started the project, there were several groups working on different approaches, and they were all based on wired implants. There was a power source located outside the eye and wires that went through the sclera to the inside, where the implant was located.
One of the companies was called Second Sight, based in Los Angeles. They had a retinal implant that was placed over the retina and was known as the Argus. Another company was Retina Implant AG, located in Tübingen, Germany, whose implant was called Alpha IMS. “Both devices failed in 2019, after clinical trials showed that patients could perceive light, but not obtain truly functional vision,” explains the physicist.
As the author of the research mentioned, Prima was born in Stanford laboratories, then it was developed by Pixium Vision and, at the beginning of 2024, this technology was acquired by Science Corporation, a company led by Max Hodak, former president of Neuralink, Elon Musk’s company dedicated to creating chips that connect the human brain with artificial intelligence, with the aim of transforming the treatment of different diseases such as epilepsy or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
Among Science Corporation’s future plans is also the development of brain chips with functions similar to those of Neuralink, which places both companies in a race for the technological development of therapeutic solutions. In the case of Palanker – author of 70 patents and founder of seven platform technologies – the steps to follow are focused on improving Prima’s functions and even expanding its scope of action for other visual diseases. One of the limitations of the current version of the chip is that it only provides black and white vision, which is necessary to read books or signs.
“We want to explore grayscale vision and the characteristics of normal scenes such as facial recognition, which is very important for patients’ social interactions. They want to see faces. And for that, we will conduct a trial on their grayscale perception and software to optimize the representation of faces. That will be done with existing patients,” he announces.
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And the other study that Palanker is planning for 2026 involves conducting a feasibility test to see if the chip would also work in patients with retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited disease that causes retinal cells to gradually stop working, which affects 1 in 4,000 people and has no cure. At the same time, this year they will continue to advance in the process of receiving approval from the health authorities for the use of the chip:
“If it works in a small feasibility trial, we will probably have to do a larger one to test its use in retinitis pigmentosa. Also, to get approval in other countries, such as the United States, some patients will need to be treated there, as they will not only accept European data and will want to have evidence generated in the US as well.
We do not yet know how many patients will be required; that is currently being negotiated with the FDA, but it is a process that is already underway. Once approval is obtained in both Europe and the United States, the technology could be used in those countries. I don’t know what the regulations are elsewhere: some may require their own studies, while others will accept US or European approval,” he says.
Regarding the arrival of this implant in other regions, such as Latin America, Palanker is optimistic and hopes that it will have a similar reception to that of the cochlear implant, developed about forty years ago and today used throughout the world by profoundly deaf patients. Currently, this device has two large manufacturers, one in the United States and the other in Australia, who are responsible for distributing it on a global scale.
The idea is that this solution reaches all the places where it is necessary and that, in a global context in which aging progresses increasingly rapidly, it is possible to read and recognize familiar faces again despite the passing of the years.
