Project description
Innovative retinal imaging for the development of vision restoration therapies
Gene and cell therapies offer hope of vision restoration for patients with inherited retinal diseases (IRDs). Retinal imaging is crucial for the development of these therapies, enabling patient diagnostics to determine which cells are degenerated, determining an appropriate therapeutic plan and cell therapy manipulations, and the clinical monitoring during treatment. The EU-funded OPTORETINA project aims to combine the existing optical setups of recently introduced dynamic full-field optical coherence tomography and adaptive optics ophthalmoscopy. This approach will allow retinal stimulation with visible light to evaluate the surviving cells in IRDs patients, characterise retinal organoids derived from pluripotent stem cells, and monitor patients in the clinical setting to check that vision is being successfully preserved or restored.
Objective
For patients suffering from inherited retinal diseases (IRDs), gene and cell therapies offer hope of preserving or restoring vision. Retinal imaging is crucial, to first phenotype patients to determine which cells are degenerated and devise an appropriate therapeutic path; then in the lab for cell therapy development, and finally back in the clinic to monitor therapeutic success in patients who have been treated with gene or cell therapy. To date, the imaging tools used in the clinic do not provide sufficient resolution for visualizing individual cells non-invasively, constituting a major roadblock for the development of gene and cell therapies.
My group develops novel optical imaging tools for noninvasive cellular imaging such as full field optical coherence tomography (FFOCT), an interferometric technique, and adaptive optics ophthalmoscopy (AOO), which corrects ocular aberrations, to achieve diffraction limited resolution of in vivo retina. Recently we also devised a dynamic FFOCT method to detect metabolic contrast using intracellular organelle motion to indicate cell activity. These new noninvasive, all optical tools have the potential to provide, for the first time, simultaneous subjective and objective retinal function measurements. Here, I propose to adapt these existing optical setups based on dynamic FFOCT and AOO to allow retinal stimulation with visible light to enable functional testing of i) patients with IRDs in order to evaluate surviving cells and orient their therapy path; ii) in vitro retinal organoids derived from induced pluripotent stem cells; ii) patients being treated in our clinical centre with novel gene and cell therapies to check that vision is being successfully preserved or restored.
The new imaging methods developed here will achieve quantitative functional assessment of cellular activity in vivo and in vitro, lifting the major imaging obstacles for successful application of gene and cell therapies in the clinic.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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H2020-EU.1.1. - EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
ERC-COG - Consolidator Grant
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) ERC-2020-COG
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75012 Paris
France
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