As part of a national “moonshot” to cure blindness, researchers at the CU Anschutz Medical Campus will receive as much as $46 million in federal funding over the next five years to perform a first-of-its-kind complete eye transplant.
“What was once a dream – curing blindness – is potentially within our reach,” campus chancellor Don Elliman said during a news conference Monday morning.
The University of Colorado team, led by researcher Dr. Kia Washington, was one of four teams in the United States to receive funding from the federal Agency for Advanced Health Research Projectsor ARPA-H. The CU-based group will focus on achieving the first-ever eye transplant that restores vision using “novel stem cell and bioelectronic technologies,” according to a press release announcing the funding.
Researchers have already successfully completed the transplant procedure in rats, albeit without restoration of vision. Now they’re ready to move on to larger animals, Washington said.
A team from New York University a complete eye transplant in a human patient in November 2023, although the procedure – while successful – did not restore the patient’s vision.
Washington said developing a small animal model, even without vision restoration, was an important milestone in the project’s progress. The goal is to fully repair the optic nerve – which carries visual information from the eye to the brain – and fully connect a patient’s brain to a donor’s eye.
The CU team will work on large animals, in addition to advancing “optic nerve regenerative strategies,” the school said, as well as studying immunosuppression, which is key to ensuring patients’ immune systems don’t attack a donated organ repels.
The goal is to eventually move on to human trials.
ARPH-A, established two years ago, will oversee the teams’ work in the coming years. Researchers from 52 institutions nationwide will contribute to the teams. The CU-led group will include researchers from the University of Southern California, the University of Wisconsin, Indiana University and Johns Hopkins University, as well as the National Eye Institute.
The total funding available for the teams is $125 million, ARPA-H officials said Monday. The money will be provided in a contract, not a grant, and ARPA-H officials liken it to a venture capital approach: The four teams will compete side by side, and projects that show success or promise will receive full funding over the next five years. The teams could also be combined or leaned on each other depending on their results, Washington said in an interview.
The project is ambitious, officials say. But its success could unlock deeper medical advances.
“If you can do this, think about what you might do for traumatic brain injury or spinal cord injury,” says Dr. Calvin Roberts of ARPA-H, an ophthalmologist who will oversee the broader project. “And those of us who work in the eyes, what we like about working in the eyes is that it’s just a model for things that are happening elsewhere in the body.”
The other teams’ research includes “3D printed click-lock gel technology with micro-tunneled scaffolds containing stem cell-derived retinal cells,” procuring donor eyes and actually performing transplant surgeries, according to ARPA-H.
The effort to cure blindness, Washington joked, was “biblical” in its enormity – a reference to the Bible story in which Jesus heals a blind man. She and others also likened it to a moonshot, meaning the attempt to successfully land Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon nearly 50 years ago.
If curing blindness is like landing on the moon, then the space shuttle has already left the launch pad, Washington said.
“We have launched,” she said, “and we are on our way.”
This is a developing story that will be updated.
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