Author: Sean Coakley, Senior Research Fellow, School of Biomedical Sciences, The University of Queensland

Earlier this year news broke about doctors in London curing blindness in children with a rare genetic condition. The genetic condition was a severe, albeit rare, form of retinal dystrophy. It causes severe sight impairment and can be caused by defects in many different genes. In this case, the four young patients had mutations in the gene encoding AIPL1. This accounts for up to 5% of infants affected by this condition, and has no treatment. In this study, published in The Lancet, a team from the Moorfields Eye Hospital and University College London Institute of Ophthalmology injected a new copy…