Revolutionary eye injection saved my sight, says first-ever patient

Doctors say they have achieved the previously impossible – restoring sight and preventing blindness in people with a rare but dangerous eye conditon called hypotony.

Moorfields hospital in London is the world’s first dedicated clinic for the disorder and seven out of eight patients given the pioneering treatment have responded to the therapy, a pilot study shows.

One of them – the first-ever – is Nicki Guy, 47, who is sharing her story exclusively with the BBC.

She says the results are incredible: “It’s life-changing. It’s given me everything back. I can see my child grow up.

“I’ve gone from counting fingers and everything being really blurry to being able to see.”

Currently, she can see and read most lines of letters on an eye test chart.

She is one line away from what is legally required for driving – a massive change from being partially sighted, using a magnifying glass for anything close up and having to navigate around the house and outside largely using memory.

“If my vision stays like this for the rest of my life it would be absolutely brilliant.

“I may not ever be able to drive again but I’ll take that!” she says.

With hypotony, pressure within the eyeball becomes dangerously low, leading it to cave in on itself.

It can happen if there is poor production of the natural jelly-like fluid inside the eye, following trauma or inflammation, for example.

Sometimes it’s a side effect of eye surgery or certain medications. Without treatment people can go blind.

Before now, doctors have tried using steroids and silicone oil to plump up the eye. But this can be toxic over long periods and doesn’t restore much vision.

Even when the cells at the back of the eye used for sight are working, the silicone oil is difficult to see through, causing blurry vision.

The experts from Moorfields decided to try a different approach with something they already had in their cupboard – a low-cost, transparent, water-based gel called hydroxypropyl methylcellulose or HPCM.

It’s already used in some types of eye surgery.

But rather than using it as a one-off, the Moorfield’s team decided to inject it into the main part of the eye as a new type of therapy.

When Nicki first had eyesight problems back in 2017, just after her son was born, she was initially given lots of silicone oil in her right eye, which was failing.

She says it had lost its normal shape and “sort of collapsed” or “crumpled like a paper bag” due to hypotony. The treatment did little to help.

And a few years later, her left eye started to fail in the same way.

“After I lost vision in my left eye, I thought, ‘there has to be something else we can try’,” she explains.

“Sheer determination. I was just like ‘I’m not giving up'”.

Her eye doctor Mr Harry Petrushkin said, together, they decided to do something entirely new – fill the eye with something that you can see through.

“The idea that we might be causing harm to somebody who has only really one eye with a treatment that may or may not work was nerve-wracking,” he recalls.

“We came up with this as a solution and amazingly it worked.

“Really, we could not have dreamt of her having the outcome that she has had.

“Somebody, who by all rights should have lost her vision in both eyes… is now living normally. That’s completely remarkable. We couldn’t have hoped for better.”

He says the same treatment could potentially help hundreds or even thousands of people each year in the UK. It comes down to whether they still have viable cells at the back of the eye that allow vision.

“We knew with Nicki there was vision to gain and she would get better if we could make her eye round and hard again.”

They’ve treated 35 patients so far, thanks to funding from the Moorfields Eye Charity, and have now published the outcomes of the first eight in the British Journal of Ophthalmology.

The treatment is given once every three to four weeks for around 10 months in total.

The researchers hope that with time, they will get even better at working out who could benefit.

“It’s been a fantastic story. The results are really promising but it’s early days,” says Petrushkin.

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