Gene Therapy at Duke Improves NC Dad’s Failing Vision Just in Time for His Baby’s Birth

A touching story comes now from North Carolina of a man who saw a reversal in his progressive blindness just in time to see the face of his newborn son.

The new father was born with retinitis pigmentosa (RP) and knew even from a young age that it would mean a total loss of vision.

Tyler Wilfong never had near-sight, and by 23 he had his driver’s license revoked for the loss of peripheral vision. Gradually he had to rely more and more on help from others to get around.

“It was inevitable, but I kept my faith in God and I just had a feeling that one day something would change,” he recalled to CBS 17. “And you know, 30-some years later, here comes this opportunity.”

Many different faulty gene copies can lead to RP, and after applying for candidacy in a medical trial at Duke University, he found that the gene therapy being tested was for the ones at fault for his vision loss.

“There’s a gene that is important for the retina to work properly, and a mutation in that gene renders it not functional, and so what we try to do is to bring a healthy copy of that gene into the eye through an injection,” said Dr. Oleg Alexeev, Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology at Duke University Eye Center.

That injection contains a disarmed virus that is instead a carrier of those healthy gene copies. Engineered to infiltrate the retina, the virus deposits the gene copy and then dies.

In the spring, Wilfong received this functional copy in one eye, and within hours realized he could see the hand in front of his face—something which he had never been able to do before.

EYESIGHT RESTORED: 

The defective gene copy that Wilfong was born with is responsible for merely 1% of the 100,000 Americans who suffer from RP, and Dr. Alexeev says his colleagues across the country really have their work cut out for them to expand on this gene therapy treatment.

But for Wilfong, seeing his hand was just the start—beholding his baby boy was the real reward for his faith—in the divine, and perhaps also in modern medicine.

“It’s been a blessing,” he told CBS 17’s Maggie Newland. “It’s made of a world of difference. Just simple tasks that you don’t even think of, like changing his clothes.”

WATCH the story below from CBS 17…

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