Towards a Prosthetic Retina
From: IEEE Grid - May 2002 - page 1

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the most common form of severe and
irreversible blindness in the US. This proposed research represents a highly
interdisciplinary effort between physicians, engineers, and scientists from
schools of Medicine, Engineering, and Humanities and Sciences to develop new
therapies for AMD and other blinding diseases of the retina. The immediate
goal of this research is to develop a neural interface that will connect a
digital video camera to individual retinal cells in the eyes of patients with
AMD, thus bypassing injured cells. 

To accomplish this, they are adapting BioMEMs technology to construct an
artificial nerve connection that will be fashioned from silicon and upon
which the microcircuitry of retinal cells will be regrown. This neural
interface would represent a new paradigm in the field of electronic
prosthetic retinas that are being developed worldwide. Such a prosthetic
would improve the quality of life for the millions of elderly Americans who
will develop AMD in the next 20 years. In addition to advancing the treatment
of AMD, this method will have wide-reaching applications in spinal cord
injuries and in the field of tissue engineering. These bioengineering
technologies will help bring basic science discoveries into clinical
realities and bridge the gap from bench to bedside.

Research in this area is being performed by Harvey A. Fishman, MD, PhD of the
Department of Ophthalmology at Stanford University Medical School. He is
director of the Stanford Ophthalmic Tissue Engineering Laboratory and a
senior research scientist in the Department of Ophthalmology at Stanford
University School of Medicine. 

http://ophthalmology.stanford.edu/researchfishman.htm
http://www-med.stanford.edu/school/eye/otel/index.html
http://ophthalmology.stanford.edu/faculty/biofish.html