Hope could be on the way for those with vision loss.
Jiarui Nie, postdoctoral fellow at the National Eye institute, National Institutes of Health and PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Brown University, delves into this.
Jiarui Nie is a postdoctoral fellow at the National Eye Institute, NIH. She completed her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering at Brown University, where she conducted this research under the supervision of Professor Jonghwan Lee. Their interdisciplinary team focuses on developing minimally invasive neural interfaces for vision restoration using nanomaterials and optical stimulation.
Gold Nanorods Offer Hope for Vision Loss
Imagine restoring vision—not through implantation surgery or gene therapy, but with a simple eye injection and a beam of light.
We’re developing a minimally invasive technology that uses gold nanoparticles and near-infrared light to help restore sight in retinal diseases like retinitis pigmentosa and age-related macular degeneration. These conditions damage the eye’s photoreceptors, which are the light-sensing cells, but often leave other retinal neurons intact.
Our method involves injecting gold nanorods into the eye using a standard clinical procedure. These particles settle on the retina. When illuminated by a patterned near-infrared laser using a custom-built optical system, the nanorods convert light into heat and activate the nearby neurons. It gives the retina a new way to detect light.
In blind mice, we found that this stimulation reactivated retinal neurons and even produced signals in the visual cortex. The approach doesn’t require implants or gene therapy—just an injection and targeted light.
This research was conducted during my Ph.D., with an interdisciplinary team of engineers and neuroscientists, under the supervision of Professor Jonghwan Lee. In the future, this technology may be adapted into wearable goggles for human use.
While it’s early-stage, our hope is to create a safer, more accessible way to restore sight—and help people regain not just vision, but independence.
Read More:
[ACS Publications] – Intravitreally Injected Plasmonic Nanorods Activate Bipolar Cells with Patterned Near-Infrared Laser Projection
