Gene therapy in ophthalmology

It has been more than a year since ophthalmologists and scientists under Dr. Robin Ali′s team at the Moorsfield Eye Hospital and the Institute of Ophthalmology, University College London, successfully treated patients with a severely blinding disease, Leber′s congenital amaurosis (LCA) using gene therapy. This success does not look to be transient, and this achievement in gene replacement therapy clinical trial for LCA has instilled hope in numerous families with patients suffering from this and similar retinal degenerative diseases, for whom restoration of lost vision has remained a distant dream so far. The encouragement that this success has given is expected to also lead to start of clinical trials for other blinding ocular diseases for which gene therapy experiments at the laboratory and animal levels have been successful. This article reviews the various studies that have led to the understanding of gene therapy outcomes in human ocular diseases and attempts to provide a brief sketch of successful clinical trials.