Transplants of fetal eye tissue seem to have improved the vision of two out of four people with a degenerative eye disease. It is too early to be sure the improvements are real and lasting, but on the strength of the results the team pioneering the surgery has asked regulators for permission to carry out further operations. Before the experimental surgery on her left eye a year ago, Elisabeth Bryant, who is 63, could barely see anything with it. "Now I can see people's eyes, noses and mouths when they're sitting across the room from me." Like the other patients in the trial, she has advanced retinitis pigmentosa, a hereditary disease that causes degeneration of the retina. It affects around 1 in 3500 people in Western countries. There is a danger of creating false hope, warn experts such as Alan Bird at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London. But the potential benefits of the procedure are too high not to continue, he says. The real pay-off could be a treatment for common diseases, such as age-related macular degeneration, which is responsible for half the blindness in Britain. "It's an enormous problem. And it seems to be increasing and occurring at an even younger age," Bird says.
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