An Eye Implant Is Giving Sight Back to Macular Degeneration Patients

More than five million people worldwide live with age-related macular degeneration, a condition that slowly burns out the center of their vision — and until now, no treatment could give that vision back. A system called Prima is changing that, according to reporting by MIT Technology Review.

How it works

Prima, developed by California-based Science Corporation, pairs a retinal implant with camera-equipped eyeglasses. Macular degeneration destroys only the photoreceptors — the retinal cells that convert light into electrical signals — while the rest of the eye's circuitry stays healthy. The implant replaces those dead cells and feeds visual information directly to the surviving circuitry and on to the brain.

The setup has four moving parts. Glasses fitted with a miniature front-facing camera capture roughly five megapixels of video at 30 frames per second. A small handheld processor converts that feed into infrared light signals. A projector on the glasses then shines near-infrared pulses at 880 nanometers through the pupil onto the implant. The chip itself has 378 pixels, each with an electrode and two photovoltaic cells that both convert light into current and harvest energy like solar cells — so no battery is needed.

The results

After training sessions, more than 80 percent of recipients were able to read, do crosswords, and use their phones, according to the report. "We're leveraging all of the body's own natural functions to process and transmit the information," Frank Brodie, an ophthalmologist at the University of California, San Francisco and medical director for Prima, told the outlet.

The system won approval in Europe in July and is awaiting FDA clearance in the United States.

Written by the BidAsk Newsroom. Based on reporting from the sources below.