‘Astonishing’ drug restores sight of blind rugby player
A BRITISH man has regained his sight thanks to an experimental treatment that could give new hope to thousands.
Rory Dewar was 22 when he lost his vision after developing a rare medical condition, but 18 months after signing up for a groundbreaking gene therapy trial in the US, the keen rugby player has recovered his sight – and is even playing the sport he loves again.
‘It’s been an incredible journey. I can hardly believe I was legally blind and now I can see again,’ he told The Mail on Sunday.
‘ My family and friends are astonished. The clinical team are astonished. I’ve been their most successful candidate so far.’
Mr Dewar, 25, has leber hereditary optic neuropathy (LHON), a condition caused by a gene mutation which destroys healthy cells in the retina, killing the optic nerve. It affects one in 30,000 people – usually men aged 15 to 25 or women going through the menopause. There is no known cure.
Mr Dewar was diagnosed with LHON after suffering a loss of vision thought to be linked to a series of concussions he suffered playing rugby in early 2017.
‘The news was a shock,’ he said. ‘I’d always been really active but my failing eyesight meant giving up a lot of things that made me happy, like rugby. I played it for as long as I could but my hand and eye co-ordination became terrible, so I stopped and I took the decision to stop driving before they took my licence off me.
‘My choices were suddenly limited and trying to see with what was left of my peripheral vision became the new normal,’ said Mr Dewar, who lives near Glasgow.
‘ The vitamin therapy wasn’t working for me, so I set myself a target to get on a clinical trial.’ His treatment in Colorado began in May 2018 when a lab- engineered virus called Lumevoq was injected into his eyeballs.
He and his partner, Lauren, have since made regular trips to the US for check-ups at the expense of GenSight Biologics, the Frenchbased company which developed the gene therapy.
Within the first 24 hours of treatment, the medical team were astonished when they held an eye chart 3ft from Mr Dewar and found a slight improvement. Steady progress has continued. ‘We were worried the early improvements might be a bit of a fluke and it was only as the weeks passed that I began to relax and accept it might actually being working,’ said Mr Dewar, whose driving licence was restored in November.
GenSight is in talks with the US Drug and Food Administration and plans to meet the European Medicines Agency before filing for market approval. GenSight said it could not comment because trials were ongoing.