PHILADELPHIA - <\/p>\n
In bright daylight, 10-year-old Mark DeVoe has no trouble seeing his friends, but inside, or even in the shade, Mark's eyes sometimes don't work. <\/p>\n
\"I have trouble seeing like, trees, when the road ends, and when there's like a drop there,\" Mark said. <\/p>\n
At age six, Mark's doctors diagnosed him with the genetic condition choroideremia, which causes people to progressively lose vision until they are completely blind. <\/p>\n
\"I don't know what it's like to live in darkness, but I've seen it,\" said Susan DeVoe, Mark's mother. <\/p>\n
Susan is a carrier of the blindness gene. Mark's grandfather has the condition. <\/p>\n
\"Watching my father go blind was devastating. I was a little girl. You know, you count on daddy to do things, and daddy couldn't do them,\" she recalled. <\/p>\n
Dr. Jean Bennett is one of two U.S. researchers preparing to test a gene therapy for choroideremia in humans. <\/p>\n
\"I think gene therapy holds a huge promise for developing treatments for blinding diseases,\" said Bennett, ophthalmologist and molecular geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania. <\/p>\n
Researchers will use a virus, carrying a normal choroideremia gene and inject the virus just under the retina. The gene should begin to work in a few weeks. <\/p>\n
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More:<\/p>\n
Health Beat: Gene therapy: From bench to bedside: Blindness<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" PHILADELPHIA - In bright daylight, 10-year-old Mark DeVoe has no trouble seeing his friends, but inside, or even in the shade, Mark's eyes sometimes don't work. Continue reading