By using ultrafast near-infrared lasers, University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) researchers provide hope for eye patients suffering from photo-degenerative ailments. The platform is an improvement from current therapies that mostly slow down or stop degeneration but do not repair damaged parts of the retina.

Using the lasers, the UTA platform delivers gene therapy to damaged areas of the retina. This treatment would restore vision to patients with eye diseases such as macular degeneration, explains Saramenda Mohanty, leader of the research. “Our capacity to specifically target those damaged areas cell by cell opens up a new world of possibilities for vision restoration,” adds Mohanty, assistant professor of physics and head of the university’s Biophysics and Physiology Group.

The team compared the results of their method of delivering genes to lipfection, a popular non-viral chemical gene delivery system, in the research. The study was published in the Light Science & Applications nature journal.

The study is timely considering that macular degeneration hits the elderly population which is growing in many countries. As a result, many ophthalmology clinics, such as the Flinders Medical Centre in Adelaide, Australia, are overstretched to the limit.

The clinic has 22,000 outpatient visits in 2014 and 1,500 day surgery procedures. Its waiting list of eye patients seeking outpatient appointment is 2,000, while there are another 500 residents waiting for surgery, reports InDaily. This situation is replicated in many eye clinics in different parts of the world, highlighting the need for new technologies to address the vision problems of people as they age.

Macular degeneration patients are expected to exceed 196 million worldwide by 2020 and further grow to 288 million by 2040, estimates a study funded by the National Research Council of Singapore and published in Lancet.

The UTA study found better results with the laser-based method than chemical gene delivery in amount of opsins produce and number expressed on cell membrane. It also enabled one-by-one target of damaged cells which could not be that specific when the chemical system is used. The former also effectively delivered large packages of genes that encode a wide spectrum of colours to damaged retinal cells. That would “enable broadband vision restoration” in patients suffering from photo-degenerative ailments.

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