Experimental gene therapy improves sight in patients going blind

By Kate Kelland, Health and Science Correspondent LONDON (Reuters) – Toby Stroh was in his 20s when his doctor told him he would go blind in his 50s, and his years of playing tennis and being able to drive or work could be gone long before that. Now aged 56, two years after his retina was deliberately infected with a virus carrying a gene to correct a protein deficiency that was destroying its cells, he is a regular on the tennis court and has a successful career in law. “For the last 30 years I’ve been living under the insidious inevitability of going blind,” Stroh told reporters at a briefing about his experimental treatment. “Now there is a very real prospect I will continue to be able to see.” Stroh is one of a handful of patients with an inherited cause of progressive blindness called choroideremia who took part in an early stage trial of a potential gene therapy treatment designed to correct a genetic defect that means retina cells gradually die.