Some 10 million Americans have degenerative retinal disease; of those, 1.9 million suffer from advanced-stage blindness. Historically, there has been little that doctors can do. Medications help only a small subset of patients -- and then just slightly improve vision or slow the disease's progress. So far, prosthetic retinas have had limited appeal: They reveal high-contrast edges and spots of light, allowing people to orient themselves within spaces they already know but hardly approximating normal vision. But now an experimental, next-generation artificial retina developed by Sheila Nirenberg, PhD -- associate professor of computational neuroscience in the HRH Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud Institute for Computational Biomedicine and in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics -- is currently in the animal testing phase and showing great promise, producing images so sharp and subtle that they closely resemble what a fully sighted person would see.
