{"id":103267,"date":"2020-03-04T17:23:27","date_gmt":"2020-03-05T01:23:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/03\/gene-therapy-is-successfully-treating-a-common-form-of-inherited-blindness"},"modified":"2020-03-04T17:23:27","modified_gmt":"2020-03-05T01:23:27","slug":"gene-therapy-is-successfully-treating-a-common-form-of-inherited-blindness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/03\/gene-therapy-is-successfully-treating-a-common-form-of-inherited-blindness","title":{"rendered":"Gene Therapy Is Successfully Treating a Common Form of Inherited Blindness"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/gene-therapy-is-successfully-treating-a-common-form-of-inherited-blindness3.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>This month, K.L. became one of the first patients to receive a new experimental gene therapy for children with a severe form of inherited vision loss. The treatment, currently not yet named, targets young men who are susceptible to a particularly vicious genetic disorder that gradually destroys the light-sensing portion of their eyes.<\/p>\n<p>Within a month following a single injection, \u201cmy vision was beginning to return in the treated eye. The sharpness and depth of colors I was slowly beginning to see were so clear and attractive,\u201d said K.L.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41591-020-0763-1\">The trial,<\/a> a first-in-human case for <a href=\"https:\/\/ghr.nlm.nih.gov\/condition\/retinitis-pigmentosa#statistics\">X-linked Retinitis Pigmentosa<\/a> (RP), was led by Dr. Robert MacLaren at the University of Oxford but spanned multiple centers including the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute in Miami, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.vox.com\/2018\/3\/22\/17147312\/luxturna-gene-therapy-retinal-disease\">which previously championed Luxterna<\/a>, the first FDA-approved gene therapy for a type of inherited blindness. The results are some of the first targeting a particularly difficult gene prone to mutation in humans. Amazingly, despite some inflammation in early stages, the therapy provided massive improvements in eyesight as early as two weeks following treatment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This month, K.L. became one of the first patients to receive a new experimental gene therapy for children with a severe form of inherited vision loss. The treatment, currently not yet named, targets young men who are susceptible to a particularly vicious genetic disorder that gradually destroys the light-sensing portion of their eyes. Within a [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":556,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,412],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-103267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-genetics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/556"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103267"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103267\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}