Giving Sight to a Blind Man: When Science Fiction Becomes Reality

The Interdisciplinary Center for Brain Research and Learning (CIRCA) at the University of Montreal will host Serge Pécaud, a specialist in the retina and the visual system, during the CIRCA’s general conferences. Circa October 10 at 4 p.m

Serge Picaud is Director of the Vision Institute in Paris and Scientific Director of the Look and Hear Foundation. He began his research career studying vision at the National Center for Scientific Research in Marseille. His work then took him to Frankfurt, then to Berkeley.

In Strasbourg, at the end of the 1990s, he joined Professor José Alan Sahel in the Laboratory of Cellular and Molecular Pathophysiology of the Retina, which combines clinical and basic research. He took part in the venture of establishing the Vision Institute in 2009, where he leads the team on Visual Information Processing in the Retina: Visual Encoding and Restoration.

In recent years, optical restoration has become the main theme of his work. During his conference, he will present various innovative strategies based on gene therapy, cell therapy, neural prosthetics, and pharmacology, both within his laboratory and in the context of several ongoing clinical trials, to restore sight to people who have become blind.

Vision restoration is certainly the biggest challenge facing brain-machine interfaces, because simple everyday tasks, such as face and motion recognition, require a large number of pixels (>600) with a high refresh rate (>13 Hz). Professor Picaud focuses primarily on cases of blindness that can result from loss of function of photoreceptors, as in age-related macular degeneration, or from degeneration of the ganglion cells and thus the optic nerve, as in glaucoma. .

This conference intended for the general public will be held in the hall of the UdeM College of Optometry and will be followed by a cocktail reception. Click here to register.