A chip the size of a pencil point inserted into the eye has helped a few dozen blind adults in Europe regain some vision — they’ve been able to paint, to recognize faces and to read to their grandchildren again.
The device, a prosthetic retinal implant, is the first of its kind to improve vision in people with a common form of blindness in older adults, afflicting roughly a million people in the United States.
It was invented by a Stanford scientist and is currently manufactured by Science Corp, an Alameda-based medical technology company. All of the clinical trials have been in Europe so far, and the company hopes to have approval from European regulators sometime this summer, which will allow them to provide it to many more people on the continent.
The wait will be longer for patients in the U.S., where the company is just getting started on the road to Food and Drug Administration approval. Even so, “it’s huge,” said Jason Menzo, chief executive of the Foundation Fighting Blindness.
“There are two benefits of this device, and one is the tangible benefit of actually restoring vision,” he said. “But the other is hope. Just knowing there’s something out there, just the promise of the technology, whether an individual even gets the device, is lifting people’s spirits.”
The device was invented at Stanford by Daniel Palanker, an ophthalmologist at Stanford who also has a background in electrical engineering. He previously built lasers for cataract surgery, which is what got him interested in efforts to create a retinal prosthesis. “People were doing it with wires, and I thought that was completely unnatural for eyes,” he said.
A 2-by-2-millimeter implant containing 370 photosensitive pixels is shown during a demonstration at Science Corp. in Alameda on Thursday. The device, invented by a Stanford scientist and now made in Alameda, is smaller than a contact lens and is surgically implanted in the eye to help some blind patients regain limited vision.
A 2-by-2-millimeter implant containing 370 photosensitive pixels is shown during a demonstration at Science Corp. in Alameda on Thursday. The device, invented by a Stanford scientist and now made in Alameda, is smaller than a contact lens and is surgically implanted in the eye to help some blind patients regain limited vision.
He came up with a device that uses light for power and to activate cells to recover some vision. He developed the first device in 2004 and published his first paper on it a year later. After testing in animals, Palanker sold the device to a French startup, which began clinical trials on humans in 2018. Science Corp. took over the device in 2024.
Results of the most recent trial, looking at 32 patients across Europe, were published in the New England Journal of Medicine in October. The patients entered that trial with very low vision — at best, they were able to see the top letter on a standard eye chart. After getting the prosthetic implant, 27 patients were able to read again, and patients on average improved their vision by five lines on the eye chart.
The device has been used so far only to treat age-related macular degeneration, a condition afflicting older adults in which the cells in the center of the retina — photoreceptors, also known as rods and cones — die. Patients eventually end up with a giant black spot in their central vision, with some peripheral vision preserved.
The prosthetic device uses a disc that’s essentially covered in solar panels and is inserted just behind the retina. After the disc is implanted, patients use special glasses with a camera that captures real-life images and, using a near-infrared projector, beams those images onto the implant.
The solar panels then convert the infrared light into electrical signals, which the surviving cells in the eye can perceive and convey to the brain. “It allows us to still use a lot of the functioning anatomy,” said Frank Brodie, Science’s medical director for vision, who is responsible for commercializing the product in Europe and getting it approved in the United States. Brodie, who is also an ophthalmologist at UCSF, happened to work in Palanker’s Stanford lab early in the development of the device.
“Until now,” Palanker said, “people tried restoring sight (with prostheses) and all they got were light and shapes. We succeeded, I think, because we properly encode information and the brain understands this information as vision.”
Patients can’t see immediately and need months of training with the glasses to teach their brain to recognize this new form of vision. They also generally recover a narrow field of central vision — so things like reading can be tedious, and they won’t be driving again.
But these were people who could not see, and now they can, Brodie said. “It’s kind of Holy Grail stuff.”
Many experimental therapies for vision loss focus on preventing disease or intervening early in the process, Menzo noted, and one exciting feature of this device is that it restores sight for those who have been losing it over years.
“There are several meaningful milestones in a person’s vision loss journey. There’s getting the diagnosis, not being able to drive, and one of the last is losing the ability to read,” Menzo said. “The fact that they’re intervening at a really key point is great.”
Dr. Frank Brodie, medical director for vision at Science Corp., poses for a portrait in Alameda on Thursday. Science Corp. is a clinical-stage medical technology company developing brain-computer interfaces and vision restoration tech.
Dr. Frank Brodie, medical director for vision at Science Corp., poses for a portrait in Alameda on Thursday. Science Corp. is a clinical-stage medical technology company developing brain-computer interfaces and vision restoration tech.
Brodie met a woman in France last summer who, three years after getting the device, was still excited about the vision she’d recovered. “It hadn’t become old hat to her,” Brodie said. “She was very enthusiastic about working on reading a novel, reading to her grandkids. It’s massively impacted her life.”
Palanker said he’s already started applying the same technology to other forms of blindness, including Stargardt disease, an inherited condition that often appears in childhood. And he and other scientists are working on the next generation of the device, “with resolution up to five times better than now,” Palanker said.
Meanwhile, Science Corp. officials say they are communicating with the FDA about getting a humanitarian device exemption, which would speed up the approval process.
Menzo said just hearing stories of people who have already recovered some vision is hopeful to others with AMD and other forms of blindness. And he said that across the field of vision loss there are more reasons than just this device to feel hopeful. Indeed, there are more than just prostheses in play — scientists are studying gene therapy and stem cells, too, along with pharmaceutical options.
“The field has never ever been anywhere near as advanced as it is today,” Menzo said. “There are 60 clinical trials happening at this moment. It’s not just ‘maybe-someday’ — today there are thousands of people who have had a treatment that is reversing or stopping disease.”
Credit: San Francisco Chronicle
