Charles Yu
Stanford University, CA·Biomedical Engineering
Light has to pass through the cornea, the clear window at the front of the eye, before the retina can sense it. Infections, injuries and industrial chemical or thermal burns can scar that window so badly that no useful light gets through, and there is currently no effective treatment to preserve vision in these cases.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
corneal blindness
vision restoration
intraocular implant
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2030
What they work on
- Determine the weight limit at which an intraocular implant becomes unstable in the eye, by implanting 25 dummy lenticule implants of differing weights into rabbits and observing them for six months.
- Establish the power safety limit for wirelessly powered eye implants by implanting 25 semi-active lenticule implants in rabbits and operating them at different power levels over six months.
- Assess long-term safety and efficacy of the complete intraocular projector by implanting 11 fully functioning devices in rabbits and measuring vision from brain signals across six months.
- Build the projector platform itself: a glasses-mounted camera and processor that wirelessly send video and power to an implanted optical apparatus that focuses images on the retina.
More about the research
Because many of these burns happen at work, corneal injury often strikes people in the middle of their working lives. This project pursues an alternative strategy: bypass the damaged cornea and deliver the image to the retina from inside the eye.
Why it matters
Millions of people worldwide are blind from corneal damage caused by accidents, disease or genetic conditions, and many have no safe and effective treatment option. A wirelessly powered implant that projects camera images directly onto the retina could eventually restore long-term vision for these patients. The rabbit experiments would define the implant weight and power levels that the eye can safely tolerate, information the field currently lacks.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Ian Pitha
University of Utah, UT·Biomedical Engineering
Determine how glaucoma drainage implant composition, design and nanoscale surface architecture affect foreign-body and scarring (fibrotic) responses, using a versatile manufacturing platform that makes implants with varied materials and textures.
Noelle Stiles
Rutgers University-New Brunswick, NJ·Neuroscience·Early-career
Measure blindness-induced reorganization of the visual cortex in retinal prosthesis patients with neural imaging, to test whether this rewiring limits the vision the implant can restore.
Yan Li
Oregon Health & Science University, OR·Biomedical Engineering
Develop ultrahigh-resolution optical coherence tomography capable of imaging the aqueous humor at the front of the eye and the vitreous gel behind it.
The school
Stanford University: 87 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 739 research doctorates a year.
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