Laboratory discoveries that increase our knowledge of how the body works occur all the time. But it’s another matter to turn this knowledge into a treatment.
“The process of translating basic science research into a clinical trial is often stalled,” says Boston Children’s Hospital ophthalmologist Carolyn Wu, MD.
Wu is one of the exceptions. Along with Ophthalmologist-in-Chief David Hunter, MD, PhD, and neurobiologist Takao Hensch, PhD, she is in the midst of a clinical trial testing whether a drug—one used for Alzheimer’s disease—can restore vision in patients with amblyopia, also known as “lazy eye.”
Amblyopia occurs when vision fails to develop properly because the brain isn’t processing the input from one eye very well. When a child is young enough, amblyopia can often be cured by blocking the better eye with a patch or blurring it with eye drops, forcing the brain to use the weaker eye. However, this treatment doesn’t work for older patients whose brains are no longer as good at forming new connections, and the weak eye can permanently lose vision.
The trial grew out of Hensch’s work studying amblyopia in mice …