Doctors Say Injecting Gold Into Eyeballs Could Restore Lost Vision
In a new study published in the journal ACS Nano, the team found that injecting gold nanoparticles into the eyes of mice with retinal disorders helped stimulate the rodents' visual systems and bring back some vision.
When targeted with infrared lasers, the microscopic gold pieces reproduce electrical signals similar to those emitted by cells in the retina that are essential to eyesight but are damaged by conditions like macular degeneration, which affects some 20 million Americans.
"This is a new type of retinal prosthesis that has the potential to restore vision lost to retinal degeneration without requiring any kind of complicated surgery or genetic modification," lead author Jiarui Nie, a researcher at Brown University and the National Institutes of Health, said in a statement about the work. "We believe this technique could potentially transform treatment paradigms for retinal degenerative conditions."
The most common retinal disorder, age-related macular degeneration, involves damage to cells in the retina called photoreceptors, causing blurry vision, blind spots, and in advanced stages, total loss of central vision. These photoreceptors come in the form of "cone" cells responsible for our perception of color, and "rod" cells that handle low light conditions. When light falls on them, the cones and rods zap little electrical pulses that are sent to bipolar and ganglion cells, which process the signals before they're beamed to the brain. If the photoreceptors are damaged, however, then the entire visual chain is cut off.
But gold nanoparticles — specifically, plasmonic gold nanorods — could effectively replace them. In the mice experiments, the researchers found that focusing infrared light onto the metal particles generated heat that stimulated the bipolar and ganglion cells, just like the photoreceptors would. This resulted in increased activity in the visual cortices of the mices' brains, indicating that the visual signals were in fact being received and that their vision was partially restored. And so far, the team hasn't observed any side effects from the approach.
"We showed that the nanoparticles can stay in the retina for months with no major toxicity," Nie said.
Applied to humans, a pair of goggles would beam infrared lasers encoding image data gathered from an onboard camera into the gold nanoparticles, and eureka — you have visual signals being sent to the brain. A similar approach was proposed a few years ago, the team notes, but crucially, this one doesn't require surgery, just a relatively simple injection (and a very advanced piece of headgear).
Nie believes the approach has other advantages, too, like allowing for a far higher-resolution image with a complete field of vision. Promising as it is, though, there's still significant research to be done before it can be tried in a clinical setting on humans, Nie said.
More on eyes: Scientists Hack Human Eye to See a Whole New Color, Called "Olo"
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