Electronic Approaches to Restitute Vision in Patients with Neurodegenerative Diseases of the Retina

Abstract

Degenerations of the outer retina are hereditary diseases leading to significant loss of vision. Several concepts of active electrical stimulation of the remaining retinal network resulted in the development of retinal visual implants and prosthetic vision. Subretinal and epiretinal visual implants are currently the leading approaches in restoring functional vision in blind humans with retinitis pigmentosa or other outer retinal degenerations. This review gives a short overview about the principles, advantages, limitations and vision outcome of the up-to-date published artificial vision by electronic visual implants, as well as their known biocompatibility and safety issues.

Antisense Oligonucleotide Therapy for Inherited Retinal Dystrophies

“…with gene therapy, only makes sense if there are sufficient photoreceptor or RPE cells left to treat (Boye et al 2013;Sahel and Roska 2013). If not, other strategies can be applied, such as cell transplantation therapy (Stern and Temple 2014), optogenetics (Sahel and Roska 2013) or epi-/subretinal electronic implants (Stingl and Zrenner 2013). Each of these strategies has made tremendous progress over the last few years, and may ultimately be suitable for specific groups of IRD patients.…”

Pharmacological approaches to retinitis pigmentosa: A laboratory perspective

“…Mutations in virtually any of the genes encoding for proteins of phototransduction and the visual cycle are responsible for a large number of retinal degenerations causing blindness. electronic prostheses, which might be placed in contact with the innermost retinal layer, close to ganglion cells (these are the socalled epiretinal prostheses), or in the natural localization of the photoreceptors (subretinal implants) (Chader, 2002;Stingl and Zrenner, 2013;Winter et al, 2007). Epiretinal prostheses (one of which, named Argus II, by Second Sight Medical Products (California, USA), has been approved for commercial use), connect to the external world through variously designed miniaturized cameras, which have the role of detecting light signals and of transferring them to a microprocessor that, in turn, transduces them into electronic impulses.…”

Retinal prostheses in degenerative retinal diseases

“…The most commonly used classification of retinal implants is based on their localization: epiretinal, subretinal, or suprachoroidal types and even inside the optic nerve head. 1,2 In this review, we focus on the subretinal and epiretinal types of prostheses. We will also discuss four representative retinal prostheses, namely, Argus II, EPI-RET 3, Intelligent Medical Implants (IMIs), and Alpha-Institute for Microelectronics Stuttgart (Alpha-IMS), along with the results of clinical trials that have been conducted to date (Table 1).…”

“…1 The mechanism of prosthesis as it relates to photoreceptors of the eye is to utilize an artificial device to detect and transform light energy into an electrical signal, conveying the electrical signal to the unaffected areas of the inner retinal neurons to evoke downstream visual pathway. 2 In other words, through electrical stimulation of the inner retinal layers, degenerative diseases of the outer retina are bypassed and substituted (Fig.…”

“…1,2,12 In this paper, we reviewed different types of retinal prostheses, visual outcomes, and current progression from clinical trials, providing useful information for future investigation.…”