Nano-Optical Switches To Restore Sight?

Roland Piquepaille writes, "Researchers in California are now using light to control biological nanomolecules and proteins. They think it can help them to develop treatments for eye diseases, such as the loss of the light detectors in the retina that is a major cause of blindness. They envision putting some of their nano-photoswitches in the cells of the retina, restoring light sensitivity in people with degenerative blindness such as macular degeneration. It will be a while before this technique emerges from the laboratory. ZDNet has additional references and pictures of what you can do with these photoswitches."

Re:Still have corrupted circuitry.....

[BWJones]

Well, we (the community of vision scientists) are working on vision rescue strategies and one of the goals at the Moran Eye Center is to assemble the best possible team we can to begin coherently working on solutions that will help resolve vision loss through development, disease and trauma. The problem with vision rescue approaches in the past little while is that they have not truly examined at a fundamental level some of the basic science involved in the neural processing of the retina. But now that we are aware of some of the complexities, we are now able to refine many of the approaches (biological and bionic) to construct better interventions.

Re:What if...

[BWJones]

It turns out that for things such as hitting a fastball etc..., the visual system actually performs predictive processing and helps you to kinesthetically program a response based upon a prediction of where an object, such as a baseball will be at the appropriate time. You don't actually "see" the ball along its entire path.

Re:Still have corrupted circuitry.....

[nutt98]

Does the visual cortex also 'remodel' when being deprived of input? If so, would it 'remodel' back after a period of time once input has been restored? Perhaps an alternative, although understandably more complex alternative would be to interfere with the optic nerve directly.

Re:Still have corrupted circuitry.....

[BWJones]

Does the visual cortex also 'remodel' when being deprived of input?

It is an interesting question that nobody has yet (unbelievably) addressed adequately. My guess is that we are going to see cortical and subcortical remodeling in any system that has been deafferented much like we see from the learning and memory literature or the epilepsy literature. Wanna job doing some of the research? :-)

If so, would it 'remodel' back after a period of time once input has been restored?

Again, surprisingly, given all of the money that has flowed into bionic retinal implants, this is work that needs to be performed.

Perhaps an alternative, although understandably more complex alternative would be to interfere with the optic nerve directly.

There are some approaches that people are working on to couple bionic implants directly into the optic nerve, but they are going to run into problems with selective stimulation of appropriate channels given that we only consciously "see" with a subset of our ganglion cells that contribute axons to the optic nerve.