A group of scientists, including doctors at NYU Langone, hopes to make a quantum leap in vision restoration with a multimillion-dollar study aimed at giving sight to the blind.
The goal is lofty: to develop the technology and techniques needed to transplant a whole working eye, something not yet achieved in the roughly 200-year history of eye transplantation. While scientists have made progress in transplanting corneas and, recently, a non-working eye, restoring sight has always been an illusory vision for surgeons in the field.
“Restoring vision through transplantation sounds like a pie-in-the-sky situation, but really the idea is that we put together all these very smart people to move things quickly and if we put enough support behind it that we advance the field,” said Dr. Daniel Ceradini, a plastic surgeon at NYU Langone and one of 40 researchers from institutions across the country who are taking part in the collaboration.
The project, backed by a $56 million federal grant and led by doctors at Stanford University and University of Pittsburgh, will focus on three main areas: retrieving and preserving donated eyes; regenerating the optic nerve, which carries light signals to the brain; and surgical procedures, Ceradini said. NYU will help refine surgical protocols, maintain eyes outside the body and integrate the optic nerve into the brain. The scientists hope their research will one day be used to treat some of the leading causes of blindness, including glaucoma and macular degeneration.
Ceradini was one of the lead surgeons who performed the first whole-eye and partial-face transplant at NYU Langone in 2023, one of the reasons he was selected to participate in the study. That surgery did not result in a seeing eye but was considered a monumental step in the field of eye transplantation. The experience will be the basis of a component of the study focused on how whole-eye transplants survive and the biological signs of organ rejection.
The group is funded through the federal Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health. One of the goals of the grant is to develop technologies that could one day be licensed for commercial use.
The process will be complex. Scientists will have to develop a device to keep the donor eye’s circulatory system viable and the fluid that will be used to pump through the vessels, both of which could be marketed in the future, Ceradini said. They will also need to develop a tool for guiding optic nerves to the right pathways, either using minuscule tubes or a type of jell.
The project is intended to last six years, a relatively short time frame for what Ceradini called “a moonshot proposal.”
“It would be huge,” he said.
