Optogenetics has proven safe for treating certain forms of blindness.

A historic week for optogenetics! Just two days after the Nobel Prize in Medicine which rewards this revolutionary technique, a study published on October 7, 2026 in the New England Journal of Medicine This adds even more brilliance. It's the first clinical trial to test this method in humans: ten blind patients with retinitis pigmentosa (a genetic disease that causes degeneration of the retina's photoreceptor cells) were treated, showing that the technique is safe and that it can partially restore sight. To better understand the implications of this pioneering trial, Sciences et Avenir spoke with Professor José-Alain Sahel, director of the Vision Institute at the University of Pittsburgh and head of the study, who, incidentally, has just received the award from the...’Association for Vision and Ophthalmology Research (Arvo) for this research.

Science and Future A Nobel Prize in Medicine followed by the publication of a clinical trial in humans – it really is optogenetics week!
José-Alain Sahel: Indeed, everyone now knows that optogenetics has been used for 20 years in almost every neuroscience laboratory to understand how the nervous system works. And for therapeutic applications, there are several areas where projects are underway. There are researchers working on hearing to try to improve the results obtained with cochlear implants. There are researchers working on Parkinson's disease to try to replace deep brain stimulation, currently performed using electrodes, with an optogenetic system. But for now, none of these applications has reached the clinical stage. The only area where optogenetics currently has a clinical application is vision.
Our study in 2021 in Nature Medicine This was the first study to demonstrate that a human could benefit from optogenetics. We are now publishing the complete patient data from this phase 1 clinical trial. It is primarily a safety trial to show that the treatment is well-tolerated. Indeed, it is a crucial question whether the expression of a protein completely foreign to the human species (which was initially identified in algae and certain microorganisms) will trigger immune reactions or toxicity problems.