May 20, 2004
Gene therapy for the retina
Dr. John Flannery, who has worked extensively with gene therapy for eye diseases in animal models, will be at the UW next week to give the annual Sidney Futterman Memorial Lecture for the School of Medicine’s Department of Ophthalmology.
Flannery is professor of vision science in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and affiliated with Beckman Vision Center at UC San Francisco.
“Gene Therapy for Usher Syndrome, a Major Cause of Combined Blindness and Deafness” is the topic. Flannery will speak at 11 a.m., Thursday, May 27, in room K-069 of the Health Sciences Center. The presentation is open to everyone.
He 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.
Flannery earned his bachelor’s degree and a Ph.D. 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.
The annual lecture is named for Dr. Sidney Futterman, a member of the UW Department of Ophthalmology faculty from 1966 until his death in 1979. His 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.
