Blind People Regain Sight Thanks to Innovative Device: Creator Interview
One of the most promising medical advances of 2025 was the one that allowed blind people to read again thanks to an ocular implant. Although it will still take several years for this solution to leave the laboratory and become widely available in clinics,it is the first time that a prosthesis of this type has restored sight to patients wiht incurable blindness.
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The results of the clinical trial of Project Prima - the name given to this feat – were published in October in the journal The New England Journal of Medicine. Far from being the end of the research, this publication that went around the world marks onyl a stage of the process: its authors are already working on the next trials and on new versions of the implant, with which they hope to achieve other promising advances in 2026.
EL COLOMBIANO spoke with Daniel Palanker, professor of ophthalmology at Stanford University and one of the three scientists who led the study. Seated in his office in California, with a whiteboard in the background covered with inscriptions that, when the image is zoomed in on the video call, look like formulas, the Doctor of Applied Physics explains how the process of more than twenty years was to develop the chip that could become a solution for one of the most common causes of blindness in the world.
It is about macular degeneration, a disease that affects central and detailed vision, which is what allows us to read or recognize faces. “It affects the macula, that’s why it’s called macular degeneration. The macula is the center of the retina, and the retina is the innermost layer of the eye, were all the light arrives. The cornea and the lens allow the passage of light to the retina, which is responsible for receiving it and sending it to the optic nerve so that it reaches the brain and we can see. The macula is what gives us the ability to perceive colors and sharpness,and it is precisely what is affected in this disease,” details andrea Hoyos,ophthalmologist specializing in retina who did not participate in the research.
The particularity of this type of degeneration is that its main risk factor is age: it is one of the main causes of blindness worldwide, and the most common in people over 60 years of age. It is believed that there are currently 200 million people with it
A feasibility study included five patients in paris, who were followed for five years, until 2023.
Given the very positive results, the company initiated a second phase for approval in Europe, with 38 patients. This trial, known as a pivotal trial or phase 3, began in 2023 and the first-year results were obtained in 2024. These findings were recently published in the New England Journal of medicine, as you know,” Palanker recounts.
That latest trial he mentions involved 38 people over the age of 60 from Great britain, France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands diagnosed with geographic atrophy, an advanced form of macular degeneration.All of them had the Prima chip implanted using a procedure that takes approximately 80 minutes, known as a vitrectomy, which the Stanford professor explains as follows:
“In this surgery, what we do is remove the vitreous in front of the retina, then we inject fluid under the retina and this lifts it.Then we make a small cut in the peripheral retina to be able to inject the chip under the retina. You slide it towards that blind spot right in the middle of the macula.
And the retina reattaches by injecting a heavy fluid, technically known as fluorocarbon. And after adhesion, the surgery is basically finished. Patients are left to recover from surgery for perhaps a couple of months and then come to the hospital to adjust their glasses and start using it.”
It took exactly between four and five weeks for the trial patients to start using the glasses, and then several months of training were needed for them to achieve greater visual acuity. Of the 32 participants who completed the one-year trial, 27 were able to read again thanks to this 30-micron thick implant, which, to give you an idea, is thinner than a human hair, which can measure up to 100 microns.
During the year the trial lasted, patients used the chip for everyday tasks such as reading books, food labels and subway signs. One of the most recognized testimonies was that of Sheila Irvine, a British woman who participated in the study and who, due to geographic atrophy, lost the ability to read, her favorite hobby. Something similar happened to alice Charton, a retired teacher who lives in Paris and who was devastated after spending her entire life teaching children to read at school, only to lose her vision and be unable to do it herself.
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