A method to cure color blindness has been found

American scientists have found a way to cure color blindness for monkeys. And by curing blind people to distinguish red and blue, this advanced technique can also restore light to the blind.

People with retinal degeneration - the main cause of blindness in the elderly - will be the first to apply this method.

Researcher Jay Neitz at the University of Washington in Seattle (USA) said: ' If we can find a way to treat an eye for a monkey-like person, there will be a lot of people who want treatment. We hope new technology can help regulate many different types of visual disorders . "

Professor Neitz used gene therapy - injecting genes that helped two male monkeys named Sam and Dalton recognize the right colors.

Like many people with red and blue blindness, monkeys also lack a cone cell pigment - the cell that detects the color behind the eye - the cell needs to look blue and red. Due to the lack of this pigment, the eyes that see both blue and red become gray. Other colors, such as orange, green and brown, are gone.

The monkey is taking a test of color blindness, in which some colors or symbols are hidden in the form of points.(Photo: Neitz / npr)

To treat the monkeys, scientists injected millions of copies of a gene into their eyes to compensate for the missing pigment. Four months later, the sight of monkeys has improved.

It is important that monkeys are injected with human genes, which shows that the ability to apply this technique in humans is very high.

Professor Neitz said: "It is as if they wake up and see new colors. They react with the colors that were invisible to them ."

However, it is still necessary to prove that injecting genes into the body will not cause any harmful side effects, so more time is needed to test this method.

Despite this, scientists are quite optimistic about this approach and hope it can be used to treat other eye conditions related to color and cone cells, including degenerative degeneration. and blindness due to diabetes.