|
 Dr. John Flannery, who has worked extensively with gene therapy for eye diseases in animal models, presented the annual Sidney Futterman Memorial Lecture at the Department of Ophthalmology, School of Medicine, University of Washington.
The title of his talk was "Gene Therapy for Usher Syndrome, a Major Cause of Combined Blindness and Deafness."
Flannery has recently focused his attention on Usher syndrome, an umbrella name for a family of inherited diseases that affect both vision and hearing. Seven genes related to Usher syndrome have been identified.
The speaker's early career was spent studying fundamental processes in the retina that control vision. He began working on gene therapy in the retina while he was a young faculty member at the University of Florida.
His studies using adeno-associated virus-mediated expression of various fibroblast growth factors have delayed or halted advancing photoreceptor cell degeneration in rat and mouse models of retinitis pigmentosa. In the process, the work has increased understanding of mechanisms important to photoreceptor cell death and survival. The treatment has not yet been tried in humans.
The altered genetic material is injected directly into the space right behind the retina in the eye and then taken up by photoreceptor and other retinal cells. While results are promising and seem to last, long-term effects of the treatment are not known.
The annual lecture is named for Dr. Sidney Futterman, a member of the University of Washington Department of Ophthalmology faculty from 1966 until his death in 1979. Futterman's research on the metabolism of vitamin A in the retina is widely recognized and he received the Friedenwald Award of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology the year before his death.
Flannery is professor of Vision Science in the School of Optometry and the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and affiliated with Beckman Vision Center at UC San Francisco. Flannery earned his bachelor's degree and a PhD in neuroscience from the University of California at Santa Barbara and then moved to the Jules Stein Eye Institute at UCLA for postdoctoral work. He has been at Berkeley since 1994.
This article first appeared in a slightly different version titled "Gene Therapy for the Retina," written on May 20, 2004 by Claire Dietz for University Week, University of Washington. See Health Sciences News.
 Back to Faculty News Page
|
