Roska Botond, an external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, received the 2024 Wolf prize for medicine. A Hungarian neuroscientist living in Switzerland won the prestigious award, close to the Nobel Prize, for restoring the sight of blind people, the MTA says in a statement. Roska is the director of the Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology in Basel and one of the founders of the Brain Vision Center in Budapest. The center was established in 2021, and its task is to prepare the basic research processes necessary for the diagnosis and therapy of central nervous system diseases and to implement the vision restoration basic research program. He shared the 2024 Wold prize for medicine with José-Alain Sahel. In their co-authored landmark study published in May 2021, they reported on the first blind patient who partially regained his sight.
Roska Botond and her fellow researchers have recently developed a method with which several almost completely blind patients have been able to restore some of their ability to see. Here we wrote in detail regarding the so-called optogenetic therapy. The patients, who previously only perceived the dark-light difference, were able to separate different objects following the treatment. The retina, a thin layer in the eye, is responsible for sensing light and then processing the resulting nerve signals. It is as if there is a light-sensing device in our eyes, or more precisely in our retina, and a minicomputer underneath.
In its announcement, the MTA presented in detail how the Roskás’ method works. When the light-sensitive cells in the retina die, patients eventually lose their vision. Roska Botond and her fellow researchers realized that the destruction of light-sensitive cells does not affect the computer in the retina, i.e. the signal processing part. The problem is that the computer does not receive a signal, it does not know what to work with. The great achievement of the Roskas was that they were able to send signals to the computer once more. This was achieved by making another group of cells in the retina, which were not originally light-sensitive, sensitive to light.
The essence of the method is that the gene of a light-sensitive protein was introduced into the cells with the help of viruses. The cells genetically modified in this way began to produce the light-sensitive protein and were then able to sense light. And the nerve signals formed in this way entered the minicomputer of the retina, which processed them. Thus, almost completely blind patients became able to perceive the presence of objects.
However, this method does not enable the eye to recognize small details, because there are no cells in the area of the retina that produces the most detailed image that might be made light sensitive in this way. Therefore, researchers are now working on a genetic method that can make other cells sensitive to light once more.
The Wolf Prize was founded in 1978 by the billionaire inventor Richard Wolf with the aim of recognizing the best scientists and artists of today for their “achievements promoting the interests of humanity and friendly relations between people”. The award is given in five scientific and one artistic category at least every year (it is not uncommon to miss a year) in Israel. The prize, which is considered to be as prestigious as the Nobel Prize in several fields of science, comes with a cash prize of $100,000.
Among this year’s award winners is another Hungarian: the music award was given to György Kurtág.
