Building a Bionic Eye Using 'Bioinspiration'

Researchers at the University of Oregon are developing a new type of retinal implant inspired by nature's patterns, that may reverse vision loss.

“The reason I'm so excited is that this paper is three years of data that explores what happens when these retinal cells interact with a fractal electrode,” said UO physicist, Richard Taylor  .

Transcript

00:00:01 We all will be expected to live long lives now up to 90 years. The problem is that the eye from an evolutionary point of view isn't designed to live that long. And one of the things that wears out is that the retina at the back of the eye. One in four of us will lose our vision due to this gradual wearing out and at the moment there is no conventional cure for that. My name is Richard Taylor and I'm a professor of physics at the University of Oregon and I specialize in nanoscale electronics and biophysics. If the retina is wearing out, the most obvious approach would be to see if we can regrow it. The problem is that the retina is an incredibly sophisticated part of the body.

00:00:47 And so it's a massive challenge for stem cell research. So although it's the obvious approach, we are about 50 years off from achieving that and so many people are going blind that we just can't wait that 50 years. So when I was 10 years old, I used to watch this TV program called The Six Million Dollar Man, and it was a thing that actually took me into science in the end because I was so thrilled about what I saw. But basically this astronaut got into an accident and they had to rebuild him for 6 million dollars. And one of the things was that they had to give him an artificial eye. It was called the bionic eye. And it was the idea that this artificial I would interface perfectly with the brain to a point where this person could even see better than with the normal eye.

00:01:39 If you talked about somebody with a glass eye, it was "ahh this poor person with a glass eye." But then there was the bionic man. Where, as a little kid, I wanted to be the bionic man because this thing was so fantastic. The human visual system is a remarkable system and it just didn't happen overnight It's taken millions of years of evolution. It started off as just this little dimple in the skin with a patch of light-sensitive material. And all it was meant to do is serve as a motion detector. Did something move or not? Through evolution, today we've got this remarkably sophisticated system. We have a lens at the front of the eye and that directs light onto a screen at the back that we call the retina. When that light hits the retina, the light is converted into an electrical signal

00:02:29 and then that is passed down the optic nerve to the brain so that you can see. So when I tell my students that we're building a bionic eye, you know, they say, "Hey, that's great, Richard, but surely that's easy." And they pull us cell phones out of their pocket and say, "Look at my cell phone. It's got this incredible camera that can take these incredible pictures. So why don't you just take that camera and put it in the eye?" And they're absolutely right. But the one big challenge that the cell phone doesn't face is that once we've effectively taken that photograph, we have to transfer that signal from the implant into the retina so that it can pass to the brain. And that's the big challenge.

00:03:09 How do we pass this signal from the artificial implant to the natural parts of the body? Everyone's familiar with Frankenstein Monster, where you attach these electrodes to the body and then zap them with a large voltage and the body springs to life. And everybody thinks that that's science fiction, but it was actually based on science fact. A French physician called Charles Le Roy essentially did what happened with Frankenstein Monster. He saw his patients down in a room, told them to close their eyes and relax. And when they did that, he whipped out these electrodes and zapped their eyeballs. And once that recovered from the surprise, he then asked them, well, what did you actually see? And they all reported seeing flashes of light. And so Charles Le Roy had demonstrated that basic fact that if you apply a large voltage

00:04:02 to the eyeball, that signal will go into the eye, shoot down the optic nerve to the brain so that you can see. So our implants are based on exactly that same process, but we're building much smaller devices that are much more sophisticated. Through my lifetime, I've seen this amazing progress in the electronics industry where circuits have become smaller and smaller and smaller. However, through that evolution of miniaturization, they've not changed the basic architecture of the circuits. And that's our big challenge. We have to change the architecture so that it mimics the architecture of our body's natural wiring. So if you look at the wiring in the body, they all have the same shape,

00:04:49 what's called a fractal pattern. So if we can replicate that fractal pattern and get this effortless communication between our chips and the eye, then that opens up these floodgates of being able to develop electronics that can interact with any part of the body. But if you look at how we actually have to do that, it's incredibly complicated. And it's a massive interdisciplinary challenge because this device has to work perfectly. It's only as good as its weakest link. We have to get the mathematics right, physics right, chemistry, biology, the neuroscience, computer science, the psychology, right. And then when we pass this to the surgeons, they have to get it right as well. So with the 6 Million Dollar Man, when I was a little kid, that seemed like a fantastic amount of money

00:05:39 that surely you can rebuild a person for $6 million. But this project that we're working on is an incredible challenge and the consequences, it does cost a lot of money. And the progress of our project is literally governed by the amount of money that we can pull in. If we do pull in sizable lots of money, then I think we're looking at 5 to 10 years before we can actually start to have this huge impact on society by bringing back that vision to one in four people.