Lorella Battelli, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Neurology
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center

Chinfei Chen, M.D., Ph.D.
Professor of Neurology
Boston Children’s Hospital

Project: Visual Restoration in Cortical Blindness: A New Protocol to Promote Fast Recovery

Blindness is usually associated with damage to the eye, but it can also be caused by damage to the parts of the brain—for instance, by stroke—that receive and process the neural signals from the eye. Each year in the United States, upwards of one-half million new stroke patients are affected by cortical blindness, impairing their ability to read, drive, navigate, and live independently. There is limited recovery, and cortical blindness patients typically undergo occupational therapy that teaches them to compensate for, rather than recover from their vision loss.

In one of the Blavatnik Sensory projects, Drs. Lorella Battelli at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Chinfei Chen at Boston Children’s Hospital will collaborate to develop therapies that encourage the brains in these patients to rewire. Dr. Battelli has discovered that a mild electric current delivered through the scalp, so small that the patients cannot feel it, can promote rewiring when coupled with a visual training task. In the Blavatnik project, the team will extend the initial studies to optimize the stimulus and training parameters in human patients. They will then ask whether electrical stimulation without specialized training can promote rewiring. If so, a therapy could be done at home, for instance while watching a movie. In parallel, Dr. Chen will carry out similar studies in mice with stroke-like damage, in order to understand the cellular processes that mediate the rewiring; these studies will in turn suggest ways to further optimize the treatment parameters in human. The study could move quickly to clinical trials for cortical blindness caused by stroke.