Waiting a bit before I bathe and get clean clothes on to start the trip. Hate to start out in half dirty duds. Not to mention a half dirty me!
Just got another phishing email. Jeez. I never even knew I had an account in that bank! And to top it off, their noun/verb agreement was wrong. Grammar and usage as fraud detection. One more reason to pay attention in language arts.
Moving on…
Living Well With Low Vision had a recent post on subretinal implants for dry AMD. We are back to Steve Austin again. Remember the Bionic Man? “We can rebuild him? We have the technology?” Yep. Now we are featuring the Bionic Senior Citizen.
We have talked about the Argus 2. That doesn’t appear as if it is ‘for us’ just yet because the quality of the image is poor. Sort of falls under the heading “something is better than nothing”. If you got nothing, it is great. Those of us who visually “got something” might be best to wait some on that.
The new one is called PRIMA by Pixium Vision and it is being developed by the French. Now we are talking early days on this. Just coming out of animal trials so don’t get too excited just yet.
PRIMA is a tiny, wireless subretinal implant that could speed prosthetic vision up to the speed of video. The French team, according to Pixium Vision CEO Khalid Ishaque, built on a concept that initially came from a team at Stanford. Real cross cultural and multinational initiative. Probably a political statement there but I won’t get into that.
PRIMA goes into phase 1 trials sometime in the next couple of months in France. They are starting with five patients with advanced geographic atrophy.
Concurrently, Pixium Vision is petitioning the FDA to try to get U.S. feasibility studies up and running. That could take a while but it is in the works. U.K.? Sorry guys. No clue. Anyone know the reciprocity laws between France and Great Britain when it comes to medical technology and research?
Adding one more, short article review here. They are also experimenting with using lasers to ‘zap’ floaters. The laser they are using is the YAG laser. Neodymium-doped yttrium aluminum garnet is a crystal. Just in case you wanted to know. No? OK. I won’t go into that.
While this type of laser has had multiple uses in ophthalmology up to this point, they are just beginning to use it to play Asteroid Blaster with floaters. Comments published in the Medscape article suggest great care be taken in using YAG lasers for this purpose. More and better organized clinical trials are needed.
That is pretty much it for now. I will be ‘WiFi enabled’ for two more days. After that, I will be shipboard. Online time is obscenely expensive at sea so I will actually have to shut up for awhile. Do you think I can stand it? [Lin/Linda: anyone want to bet on this? ::grin::]
Written October 29th, 2017