The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), an agency within the US Department of Health and Human Services, has awarded the the Foundation Fighting Blindness and its partners the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, and six other researcher groups up to $46 million to support research and innovation in vision-restoring human whole eye transplantation. According to a Foundation press release, it has assembled a multi-disciplinary team of renowned scientists, researchers and physicians at multiple research institutions, whose shared goal is to accelerate convergent technologies to achieve the mission outlined by ARPA-H: to cure blindness within 6 years.
The team will be led by the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus (the prime recipient of the award), and includes Johns Hopkins University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Indiana University School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, and the National Eye Institute.
ARPA-H's Health Science Futures Office (HSF) established the federal program, THEA (Total Human Eye-allotransplantation Advancement) to further develop a combination of medical, therapeutic and surgical technologies to advance whole eye transplantation as a cure for blindness in people with ocular-based disease or damage. The primary goal of THEA is to build on the latest advancements in medicines, cell therapies and surgical techniques to regenerate retinal and optic nerve cells and restore their connectivity to the brain to enable functional vision. Additional program goals include improving tissue harvest and preservation, optimizing optic nerve reattachment and repair technologies, and advancing surgical strategies, post-op care and ocular health assessment tools.
The Foundation will run strategic point for the consortium and serve the central function of ensuring progress maintains alignment with the program requirements and mission, with the its senior director of the Preclinical Translational Research Program, Chad Jackson, PhD, overseeing the 6-year project. In its press release, the Foundation noted that to-date it has raised more than $954 million to fund cutting-edge research and launching more than 45 clinical trials for potential treatments for blinding conditions.