Virus used to fight blindness

University of Utah Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences Dr Rajenda Kumar-Singh received a $200,000 grant from Research to Prevent Blindness to develop techniques to treat retinitis pigmentosa. Dr Kumar-Singh programs a standard cold virus into a recombinant adenovirus, to correct the genetic retinal disease. It is injected into the retinas of mice predisposed to the disease, which normally blinds them after their first two or three weeks of life. The treatment has been able to delay their blindness for up to 10 weeks. 'Because viruses have been adapted through evolution to deliver their own genetic cargo to the cell, we can manipulate this ability and put therapeutic DNA in the virus. We are trying to develop a therapy that will treat the cause of the disease rather than the effects.'