| 초록 |
Retinitis pigmentosa, age-related macular degeneration, and Stargardt disease are the most common incurable eye diseases leading to blindness. Among the various current trials to cure those diseases including optogenetic stimulation and stem cell therapy, only electrical retinal prosthetics has validated clinical promise. Yet, the electrical prosthetics still suffers from fundamental limitations such as the invasive nature of the device and both the limited number and fixed location of stimulation sites. Here, this study establishes the feasibility of novel, minimally-invasive, high-resolution retinal prosthetics in animal models, based on an emerging neuromodulation approach, nanoparticle-enhanced near-infrared neural stimulation. When a neuron is attached with gold nanorods (AuNRs), near-infrared (NIR) light illumination with a wavelength matching to the nanorod’s resonant wavelength was shown to activate the neuron via photothermal effects. |
