Video Included
Remember the 1970s TV show The Six Million Dollar Man, featuring Lee Majors as Col. Steve Austin? Also known as the “Bionic Man,” he had a number of bionic – electronic and/or mechanical – body parts, including one eye, which gave him super-human powers to fight evildoers and save pets, small children and damsels in distress from imminent peril.

I can still hear the opening voiceover of the show: “We can rebuild him. We have the technology. We can make him better than he was.” And I can’t forget the low-tech sound effect (ching-ching-ching) and slow-motion visuals whenever Austin performed one of his bionic feats. The show was a guilty pleasure I looked forward to every week.

But bionics is no longer just entertaining TV. And while today we can’t always make people better than they originally were, researchers are developing incredible bionic technology to improve the quality of life. The “bionic,” or artificial, retina is one such example.

Thanks to the company Second Sight, people who’ve lost their vision to retinitis pigmentosa can now buy an artificial retina in Europe; and the company is hoping to gain FDA approval soon to make it available in the U.S. Its device, called the Argus II, doesn’t have all the features of Steve Austin’s bionic eye, but it does provide rudimentary vision to people who are otherwise completely blind.

The video below, from this CBS News piece, features a user of the Argus II and Foundation-funded researcher Dr. Lucian del Priore, who demonstrates how the device works and the independence it can provide. Promising clinical trial results, which could be key to FDA approval of the device, will be published in April in the peer-reviewed journal Ophthalmology. In that paper, Second Sight will report that the Argus II consistently improved vision and worked safely.

More than a decade ago, FFB funded lab research at Johns Hopkins University for an early version of this technology, and it’s exciting to see it working in people today. (The juice was definitely worth the squeeze for the Foundation to invest in this). Dr. Brian Mech, vice president of development at Second Sight, recently told me that, in 2014, the company plans to launch a clinical trial of the Argus III, which has 240 electrodes, compared to the Argus II’s 60 electrodes. The increased number is expected to give the user sharper vision.

Other companies are developing artificial retina technology, including the German company Retina Implant AG, which has reported good results in early clinical studies – and will be at VISIONS 2012, FFB’s national conference, this summer in Minneapolis – as well as Nano Retina, in Israel, and Bionic Vision Australia.

I look forward to reporting on forthcoming advancements for these promising technologies – which have the potential to counteract vision loss caused by various retinal degenerations – as they occur.

As for the Six Million Dollar Man, Lee Majors is now 72 years old. And, adjusting for inflation, my guess is that he should now be referred to as the Thirty-Sixty Million Dollar Man.