An eagerly awaited and controversial clinical trial to ‘wind back the clock’ on aging cells in the eye and restore them to a more youthful state has officially begun.

This week, the United States biotechnology company Life Biosciences, Inc. announced that it had dosed its first patient with an experimental therapy designed to reverse age-related vision loss.

The ambitious idea is to turn back aging by activating three genes in retinal ganglion cells, which connect the brain to the eyes.