Eye-opening discovery about adult brain’s ability to recover vision

UCI team demonstrates the adult brain has the potential to partially recover from inherited blindness

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - IRVINE

Irvine, Calif., Oct. 6, 2022 — A discovery about how some visually impaired adults could start to see offers a new vision of the brain’s possibilities. The finding that the adult brain has the potential to partially recover from inherited blindness comes from a collaboration between researchers in the University of California, Irvine School of Biological Sciences and the School of Medicine. Their paper appears in Current Biology.

The team was examining treatment for Leber congenital amaurosis, known as LCA. The term refers to a group of inherited retinal diseases distinguished by severe visual impairment at birth. The condition, which stems from mutations in any of over two dozen genes, causes degeneration or dysfunction in the retina’s photoreceptors.

Administering chemical compounds that target the retina, called synthetic retinoids, can restore a notable amount of vision in children with LCA. The UCI team wanted to find out if the treatment could make a difference for adults who have the condition.

“Frankly, we were blown away by how much the treatment rescued brain circuits involved in vision,” said Sunil Gandhi, professor of neurobiology and behavior and the corresponding author. Gandhi is a fellow of UCI’s Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory and a member of the Center for Translational Vision Research. “Seeing involves more than intact and functioning retinae. It starts in the eye, which sends signals throughout the brain. It’s in the central circuits of the brain where visual perception actually arises.” Until now, scientists believed that the brain must receive those signals in childhood so that central circuits could wire themselves correctly.

Working with rodent models of LCA, the collaborators were surprised by what they found. “The central visual pathway signaling was significantly restored in adults, especially the circuits that deal with information coming from both eyes,” Gandhi said. “Immediately after the treatment, the signals coming from the opposite-side eye, which is the dominant pathway in the mouse, activated two times more neurons in the brain. What was even more mind-blowing was that the signals coming from the same-side eye pathway activated five-fold more neurons in the brain after the treatment and this impressive effect was long-lasting. The restoration of visual function at the level of the brain was much greater than expected from the improvements we saw at the level of the retinae. The fact that this treatment works so well in the central visual pathway in adulthood supports a new concept, which is that there is latent potential for vision that is just waiting to be triggered.”

The finding opens exciting research possibilities. “Whenever you have a discovery that breaks with your expectations about the possibility for the brain to adapt and rewire, it teaches you a broader concept,” Gandhi said. “This new paradigm could aid in the development of retinoid therapies to more completely rescue the central visual pathway of adults with this condition.”

Gandhi and first author Carey Huh, PhD, who initiated the project, teamed with Krzysztof Palczewski, Distinguished Professor of ophthalmology. Palczewski, director of the Center for Translational Vision Research, is renowned for his work on retinoids and the visual cycle. Philip Kiser, associate professor of physiology and biophysics, an expert on visual cycle biochemistry, helped lead the group. Kiser, who holds a joint appointment in ophthalmology, is a member, Center for Translational Vision Research.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Research to Prevent Blindness foundation.

About the University of California, Irvine: Founded in 1965, UCI is a member of the prestigious Association of American Universities and is ranked among the nation’s top 10 public universities by U.S. News & World Report. The campus has produced five Nobel laureates and is known for its academic achievement, premier research, innovation and anteater mascot. Led by Chancellor Howard Gillman, UCI has more than 36,000 students and offers 224 degree programs. It’s located in one of the world’s safest and most economically vibrant communities and is Orange County’s second-largest employer, contributing $7 billion annually to the local economy and $8 billion statewide. For more on UCI, visit www.uci.edu.

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JOURNAL

Current Biology

ARTICLE TITLE

Retinoid therapy restores eye-specific cortical responses in adult mice with retinal degeneration

Recent advances in smart contact lenses

Peer-Reviewed Publication

AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY

Contact lenses are most often used to correct blurry vision, but sometimes, people wear differently colored ones for fun. And with Halloween just around the corner, people will soon be stocking up on red, black or cat-eye contacts to look extra spooky. Researchers are currently working hard to adapt these little hydrogels into smart devices to treat color blindness, for use in wearable virtual displays, and for drug delivery and noninvasive health monitoring. Below are some recent papers published in ACS journals that report insights into powering smart contacts, as well as new ways they can deliver drugs. Reporters can request free access to these papers by emailing newsroom@acs.org.

Powering smart lenses
“Safe, Durable, and Sustainable Self-Powered Smart Contact Lenses”
ACS Nano
Sept. 7, 2022
Here, researchers showed that the glucose in tears can power smart contact lenses. They sandwiched a microscopic glucose fuel cell between soft hydrogel layers. Combining the fuel cell with color-changing crystal arrays produced a protype sensor that visibly distinguished artificial tears simulating a diabetic condition from controls. The device still needs to be made even smaller, however, before it could be used in smart glucose-sensing contact lenses, say the researchers.

“Flexible and Semi-Transparent Silicon Solar Cells as a Power Supply to Smart Contact Lenses”
ACS Applied Electronic Materials
Aug.1, 2022
In this paper, flexible, semi-transparent solar cells were designed for running the microelectronic and optoelectronic elements in smart contact lenses. Researchers molded the 15 µm-thick silicon-based photovoltaics in arcs, embedding them into dome-shaped lenses. Based on experiments in indoor and outdoor light, the researchers estimated that their 25 and 50% transparent solar cells could generate 49.3 and 26.6 J cm-2 per day, respectively, showing their potential to deliver energy to smart contact lenses.

Delivering drugs
“Printable Metal–Polymer Conductors for Local Drug Delivery”
Nano Letters
Sept. 19, 2022
Medications, such as drops or ointments, that are administered topically can enter the body more easily with localized applications of electricity. As a step toward using this technique to treat eyes and skin, researchers printed liquid metal circuits onto stretchable and bendable pieces of polydimethylsiloxane, simulating contact lenses and skin patches. In animal model tests, electrical pulses were applied to the metal-polymer contact lens, which the researchers found improved the therapeutic effect of eye drops.

“Pressure-Triggered Microfluidic Contact Lens for Ocular Drug Delivery”
ACS Applied Polymer Materials
Sept. 7, 2022
Most eye infections are treated with drops, but blinking and tears quickly rinse them away. So, researchers have developed prototype smart contact lenses that can gradually deliver drugs directly onto the eye. The lenses have arc-shaped microfluidic channels and a micropump that’s activated by eyelid pressure. In blinking simulations, the flexible, transparent lenses released drug-like fluids in a controlled and sustained manner without the need for electronic components.

The American Chemical Society (ACS) is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. ACS’ mission is to advance the broader chemistry enterprise and its practitioners for the benefit of Earth and all its people. The Society is a global leader in promoting excellence in science education and providing access to chemistry-related information and research through its multiple research solutions, peer-reviewed journals, scientific conferences, eBooks and weekly news periodical Chemical & Engineering News. ACS journals are among the most cited, most trusted and most read within the scientific literature; however, ACS itself does not conduct chemical research. As a leader in scientific information solutions, its CAS division partners with global innovators to accelerate breakthroughs by curating, connecting and analyzing the world’s scientific knowledge. ACS’ main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.

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