Gene Therapy Deals Blow Against Rare Blindness

Oct. 25, 2009— -- Gene therapy to counteract retinal degeneration from a rare inherited sight disorder improved vision in all patients in which it was tested -- including one child who recovered near normal light sensitivity.

While the 8-year-old boy was the clearest success story, all the children with a condition known as Leber's congenital amaurosis treated in the study regained sufficient vision to walk unaided, Dr. Jean Bennett of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and colleagues reported at the American Academy of Ophthalmology on Saturday.

Younger patients appeared to respond best to the treatment, which involves injecting the eye with genetic material "piggybacked" on a virus, the researchers wrote in a paper released in the medical journal Lancet.

The trial provides hope for one of the most severe forms of inherited retinal degeneration, a disorder that currently has no treatment.

But co-author Dr. Katherine High of Children's Hospital of Philadelphia cautioned against considering this treatment a cure at this point. "We don't know how long it will last," she said, though noting that the effect has lasted at least 10 years in animals.

Children born with a mutation in one of 13 genes that cause Leber's congenital amaurosis typically have severe vision deficits from birth that progress to total blindness by age 30 to 50.

Though the research on the treatment is still in its early phases and the results thus far have been based on only a few treated patients, the findings hold great promise, according to a commentary accompanying the Lancet paper.

Not only were the treatment effects sustained after only a single injection, but the same strategy may be effective in slowing or stopping retinal degeneration from other genetic causes, such as retinitis pigmentosa, wrote Frans Cremers and Rob Collin, both of Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

"As novel therapeutic strategies are being developed for each of the separate genetic defects, ascertaining and genotyping the corresponding patients will be the real challenge in the coming decade," they said, noting that even in the industrialized world less than 10 percent of patients know the genetic cause of their inherited blindness.