Cell-Based Therapy for Retinal Degenerative Disease (2014). Editors: Casaroli-Marano RP, Zarbin MA. ISBN: 978-3-318-02584-2 Karger

Excerpt

The field of hereditary retinal degenerations was always a dead end for most retinal specialists. There was no treatment that could alter the course of this progressive loss of vision, and even more importantly there was no understanding of what was going wrong. It was depressing to see such patients. In the last few years, this view of retinal degenerations has been turned around. It has become an exciting field in translational medicine. This advance depends on revolutionary developments in medical genetics. Every hereditary retinal degeneration can now be linked to specific genes. This revolution began about 25 years ago when Jeremy Nathans cloned the genes for opsins, which mediate the first step in vision. This was quickly followed up by a Harvard team which detected a deleterious mutation in the rhodopsin gene that caused a form of retinitis pigmentosa. These events have since led to the detection of hundreds of other genes responsible for a multiplicity of retinal degenerations (see https://​sph.​uth.​edu/​). …