The Way to Cure Color Blindness?
- Posted by Daniel Flück on March 27th, 2007 filed in Academic
As for today there is no known treatment to cure color blindness but maybe in the near future there will be some possibilities to overcome color blindness and even enhance color vision overall.
Researchers from the University of California and the Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore showed in a series of experiments, how the color vision abilities of mice can be enhanced. Mice have naturally only dichromatic vision which can be compared to red-green color blindness. Dichromatic means, they have only two different types of color receptors in their eyes whereas humans normally have three different types which make up our color vision.
The scientists “pimped” the mice in their experiments with the missing genes for color perception which they took from humans. And those mice performed much better in the test setup as their dichromatic colleagues. This led to the assumption that the enhanced mice have a better (trichromatic) color vision.
Other researchers have also shown that they could cure color blindness in monkeys through injections of the missing color receptor genes.
What can we learn from this?
- Color Blindness can be cured or at least it could be cured in about 6 cases of mice and monkeys so far.
- We are on the way of the perfect human being and don’t even forget to exterminate color blindness on that way.
- You won’t experience the cure of color blindness because this are only the first steps from a very long way.
If you are looking for a treatment of color blindness you still need to wait quite a while. And in case you can’t wait—hope dies last.
The Washington Post published an article about this research last week called Mice See New Hue With Added Gene. The original work was published in the science magazine: Emergence of Novel Color Vision in Mice Engineered to Express a Human Cone Photopigment.
July 7th, 2007 at 5:32
From the Ishihara test that I undertook, it was found that I am sufferring from
Red-Green defficiency- Deuteran- Partial.
Is there any cure for it? I think “NOT YET”.
But is there any solution for it,eg, some kind of lenses,etc. ?
Please help…
July 7th, 2007 at 7:31
Chintu, as you say there is no cure for color blindness at the moment. And there won’t be for quite a long time.
There are some contacts and glasses available. Unfortunately I haven’t tried any of them. You might like to check out one of the following links:
ColorCorrection System™
ColorView®
ChromaGen™
August 13th, 2007 at 12:37
hey there,just wanted to know like how long are we talking about here for them to come up with a cure for color blindness…thanks
August 13th, 2007 at 19:57
That’s a tough question Mr. John Doe. Of course nobody can really tell if there will ever be a cure and if so, when this will be available for normal humans.
But let’s assume that there will be a possibility to cure color blindness in the future. My suggestion is, is would take at least ten more years to make a lot of tests on animals. At least another ten years to make this happen for men. So it still will take a long long time until we have a little chance to be a bit closer to cure color blindness.
September 17th, 2007 at 13:48
there are some contacts and glasses avaible for color blindness.i have contact lenses.it is great you can see the numbers in ishihara tests.
try it
:)
September 21st, 2007 at 21:03
how much are the colorblind contacts?
September 27th, 2007 at 7:43
Zac, sorry but I don’t know any prices. I’ll try to find out more about it in the near future and of course will post my findings on Colblindor.
October 25th, 2007 at 18:55
Sorry for my english, I am very interested on the treatment of the colorblind because it’s affect directly to my job. I read your comments and I think, it’s my opinion, you are a little pessimistic on your predictions. Days ago I read an interview to DR Neith who works at Medical Collegue of Wiscosin who are researching about this disability. I attach some paragraph about this interview. Regards.
Dr. Neitz noted that this is the first trial ever of gene therapy in any animal involving the cone photoreceptors as a target. “I feel really confident about this, and since all the pieces are in place I’m hoping that it will work in a monkey within two years, he said. “If it works in a monkey we have to go to human trials and have to get FDA approval and so forth, so it could be about five years to get to the point where we’re able to use the technique in humans.
Dan Ullrich
HealthLink Contributing Writer
Article Created: 2004-04-14