This work, developed by John Flanagan of Harvard Medical School, Carol A. Mason of Columbia University, Carla Shatz of Stanford University and Christine Holt of Cambridge University,. may offer hope of fighting vision disorders by means of neurological therapies, the Champalimaud Foundation said in a statement issued this week.
The link that the 2016 António Champalimaud Vision Award winners have established between the eyes and the brain opens up the potential to cure certain vision disorders via neurological treatments.
Therapies targeting the brain and its capacity to accurately receive projections from the retina may therefore hold the key to unlocking new types of treatment and to bringing sight to those unable to see as a result of poorly established synaptic connections.
Much of what we currently know about the cellular and molecular mechanisms involved in establishing and sculpting the patterns of retinal projections comes from the individual and collective efforts of Drs. Flanagan, Holt, Mason and Shatz.
Their work has shone light on the connection between the two fundamental organs responsible for vision - the eye and the brain - and their ground-breaking work has greatly advanced our understanding of the visual system.
In the year that commemorates the 10th anniversary of the António Champalimaud Vision Award, the prize-giving ceremony was presided over by the President of the Portuguese Republic, Prof. Dr. Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, with the presence of all the members of the award’s jury and the winners of previous editions. This was the perfect time to celebrate not only the presentation of the António Champalimaud Vision Award to the 2016 winners, but also the profound impact that, over the past 9 years, this has had in the fight against preventable blindness in the world through the work done by scientists and organisations that have already been honoured.
The Lisbon-based Champalimaud Foundation’s annual Vision Award was created in 2007 and claims to be one of the world’s largest scientific prizes, with winners collecting a cheque for one million euros.