By Roberta Zeff, Director of Strategic Communications at Pitt Health Sciences
The University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research, Inserm, will establish an International Vision Institute, the first such partnership for Inserm.
Didier Samuel, Chair and Chief Executive Officer of Inserm, and Anantha Shekhar, John and Gertrude Petersen Dean of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, signed an agreement on Oct. 29 at the French Embassy in Washington, D.C., affirming their intent to collaborate on the lab, a five-year project. The coordinators will be Serge Picaud, Director of the Institut de la Vision in Paris and José-Alain Sahel, Director of the UPMC Vision Institute in Pittsburgh.
“We are all working to develop effective treatments for people with blindness or severe vision loss,” Dr. Sahel said. “We hope that by teaming up, we can do even more to improve or preserve their vision through cutting-edge therapeutic strategies.”
About 2.2 billion people around the world have vision problems. Among them, more than 280 million have severe visual impairment, and 40 million are blind. With an aging population and rising cases of diabetes and other long-term health problems, these numbers are likely to double or even triple in the next decades.
Currently, there is no known effective treatment that can prevent or reverse vision loss or restore functional vision in inherited and age-related ocular degenerative diseases.
This project aims to develop a better understanding of vision health and diseases while finding new ways to prevent vision loss and help restore sight.
The two institutes develop complementary therapeutic strategies for vision restoration, including gene and cell therapies, optogenetics and visual prostheses. This joint lab will focus on the development of novel therapeutic strategies as well as markers for relevant disease staging and the choice of appropriate and personalized therapy for patients.