Highlights from the 16th Retina International Conference

Hi all,
at the 11th hour I decided to attend the 16th Retina International conference, held in Stresa, Italy, last weekend. So glad I did! I've written down some of the highlights that most impressed me. The conference wasn't specifically on LCA but most of the LCA researchers we know were there, so that was a terrific opportunity for me. Here is some of the best stuff:

Dr. Jean Bennett presented the astounding results of the RPE65 trials. Children who were virtually blind can now play baseball and walk without a cane! We all had read that, but to hear it from her was exciting.

Dr. Koenekoop showed the incredible results of the QLT drug for LRAT LCA. After only nine days of oral administration, vision improved dramatically, and the visual field kept increasing until it tripled! It produced improvements even in an adult patient. He said they will now test it on people with RPE65. To the question about future application of similar drugs to different LCA genes, he did not rule it out, but didn't go into details.

Many researchers said that soon gene therapy trials for other genes will be planned. Dr. Jean Bennett said that she cannot say which will come next, but different labs are working on diferent animal models. Some of the candidates for future clinical trials that were mentioned were AIPL1, LCA5, RPGRIP, Gucy2d, and CEP290. CEP290 is being studied a lot, the problem with it is that it is a large gene, but many labs are working on building the right vector to get it into the retina; once it is found, things should go fast from mice to cats to humans. I was lucky to be able to speak with Dr. Koenekoop and Dr. Auricchio about CEP290, they both sounded quite optimistic.

Dr. Eberhard Zrenner spoke about the retina prosthesis. It's promising, though the visual field it allows is still pretty small. We were shown a video where a blind person receiving the implant was able to read a few letters on a chart and recognize some objects. For now they will not try it on people blind from birth.

Unfortunately I missed the lecture on stem cells by Robert Ali. Comments I heard were that research is progressing, but application is a bit further away.

An exciting new development I had never heard about before is photoswitch, which is a strategy that aims to activate ganglian cells of the retina to interpret light and send signals to the brain, bypassing photoreceptors. It isn't working yet, but Dr. Gerald Chader was confident that it might work soon, and make it to human trials. This is wonderful as it would enable vision even in people with no living photoreceptors.

A lot was said about drugs like nerve growth factors which can prolong the life of photoreceptors, but I didn't follow those too closely, sorry.

All in all it was a thrilling experience, lots of good news, good pespectives for the future, an an optimistic atmosphere, as well as lots of wonderful researchers who were all willing to answer our questions.

If you have any questions, please email them to me and I'll see if I can remember more...

Fran