YAEL HANEIN: So I want to describe to you

research activity that is taking place

in my lab over the past several years,

including some extensive collaboration that we

do with several colleagues.

And I want to get started with describing

just a little bit the visual system.

The visual system basically looking

across different creatures, different animals,

is fundamentally the same.

And at the very core, it's the capacity

of the brain to reach out and to look into the environment.

And one of the fascinating things about the visual system

is that it's really adapted to accommodate

the different needs of different creatures.

So humans in particular have very strong needs, one of which

is actually to recognize facial expression.

And clearly, as humans we have developed technology

that goes hand in hand with our visual capacity.

So overall, put together, about 80% of what we perceive

and comprehend, but also remember and plan,

is based on visual information.

So we're really technological creatures, I mean,

and this is probably one of the best places

to highlight this point.

But it's really not just about survival.

It's survival, but also expanding our capacity

in terms of our ability to read, to learn, to plan

the future, which really goes hand in hand

with our technological capacity and our visual capacity.

Now the important thing to realize

is that technology and modern science

actually have some additional link with visual information.

And this is a little bit tricky to comprehend.

So if we look overall at longevity,

we all know that people live longer.

The numbers are quite amazing when we look at them.

And so if you just look at what was the reality just about

100 years ago, people didn't live very long.

So modern medicine had immense capacity

at prolonging life and making all of us live much longer.

So clearly there are some differences

between developing and developed countries.

But generally in the developed world, people live very long.

And this has to do with the ability

to eradicate a lot of diseases that

typically cause early death.

Now how does that relate to vision?

So one of the consequences of living longer

is the fact that certain diseases, as I mentioned,

have disappeared.

But on the other hand, several other diseases

that were unknown before are becoming very prevalent.

And one of them is AMD, or age-related macular

degeneration, which is the situation where

the central part of our macula, or central part

of our visual system, which is the macula, it's

the center of the retina, becomes degenerate.

And that means that when we age, there's

an onset of the disease.

And when we look at the population

of 80-year-olds and above, there's

a staggering number of people that

will suffer from this disease.

So if you go ahead and extrapolate

what would be the situation in 20 years, in 50 years,

the numbers are going to be very high.

So the current estimates is by the year 2050,

among the American population, there

would be over 5 million people suffering from AMD.

Now AMD doesn't mean total blindness,

but what AMD means is that our capacity

to read, to write, to recognize faces

is severely damaged to the point that in many patients

it's damaged completely.

And the consequences are loss of independence, depression,

and a major financial burden on the patients themselves,

but also on additional circles of family and friends.

So by this point you're all spooked.

And this is probably the time to start

talking about the future and the technological solutions.

And so this is where we introduced

the issue of artificial vision.

Now artificial vision sounds like complete science fiction.

But in fact, over the last several decades,

there is a whole range of related technologies

that have been developed and have

been proven to do just what we're

aiming to do in artificial vision.

So cochlear implants are devices that

are implanted in the cochlea in the ear

and have been used already with just over 200,000 people.

And what these devices do, they can take auditory information,

transfer that into electrical stimulation,

and stimulate nerve cells, and basically

address the nerve track in order to stimulate information that

ultimately is conceived as auditory information.

And so this technology has been really the trigger

and the motivation to develop additional technologies

such as the artificial vision.

And so artificial vision are devices

that you see on the right-hand side.

These are actually devices, actual prototypes, two of which

have already passed even regulatory cycles

and are approved for use not for AMD patients,

but for RP patients.

And such devices utilize microfabrication technology

and allows people to see.

Now what does it mean, it allows people to see?

It allows them to have the sensation

of visual information.

So what these pioneering studies have demonstrated

is several very fundamental issues.

First, it has demonstrated the fact

that you can build a device.

You can implant it for a long term.

And you can transfer electrical signals

that are perceived by the brain as visual information.

The second point is that you can also

demonstrate using cochlear implants and these implants,

that the brain plasticity have the capacity to, over time,

to understand better and better this visual information that

is being transferred.

So basically the science fiction part of it

has been taking a little bit out of it in the sense

that we know that these things are technologically possible.

The challenge remains though that the systems that

have been developing over many, many, many years--

this is a long path it takes from the design

to the actual realization of these devices-- they're still

very bulky, very big, require external energy source,

and requires extensive wiring.

And often this wiring has to extend out

of the eyeball, which makes the whole thing pretty messy when

you think about it in terms of surgical procedures.

So that the moon shot thought is really to take all of that

and turn that into a compact device,

basically something that can be inserted neatly into the eye

and placed against the retina.

So this is clearly what you would

like to do when you talk about an artificial retina,

but then the question is how do you go about doing that?

So what you really need is new materials, either new polymers,

new nanotechnology tools, just tools that actually did not

exist when the original artificial retina devices were

beginning to be developed.

So now we do have new materials available.

And what we've been trying to do is really

to go back to the very basics and to try

to imitate the system to the very, very fundamental levels.

So a natural system is relied on photoreceptors.

The photoreceptors are the elements

that are degenerated in AMD.

And what you want is actually the capacity

to be able to elicit electrical information instead

of those elements, instead of these photoreceptors that

are gone.

Now in the natural system, especially in the macula,

there are a lot of these photoreceptors.

There's a very high density of them.

And they operate in a very efficient way.

And so what we're trying to do is

to use carbon nanotube as a scaffold

onto which we want to introduce energy harvesting

elements or photo harvesting elements,

and the combination of these two,

the photo conducting elements on the one hand

and the carbon nanotube as a scaffold on the other hand,

can simultaneously generate the needed electric field,

which is needed in order to stimulate the retina.

Now in terms of actually demonstrating that,

so one approach that we've demonstrated very recently

with colleagues from Bangalore is using conductive polymers.

So you can take newly-developed conducting polymers,

deposit them on the interface of electrodes.

You can take a blind retina, place the blind retina

on the interface, shine light in a very precise way,

and demonstrate that the retina can see.

So this is a blind retina that sees visual information that

are mediated by the special interfaces.

The actual approach, or the major effort in my lab,

is actually to use the carbon nanotubes as a scaffold.

And this is an ongoing work that we've

been doing for the past 10 years in which we've been constantly

demonstrating the great advantage of using carbon

nanotubes for this application.

So carbon nanotubes have several fundamental properties,

which are really ideal for this application.

One is that it's almost like a natural Velcro, which

makes a very strong and intimate contact

with biological systems.

And we've been demonstrating that in vitro, ex vivo,

and in vivo.

So these are absolutely fantastic materials

in binding to the biological system.

The other thing is that they are a fantastic electrochemical

system, and you can use them as electrodes

both for recording and stimulation.

You can really convince yourself that you

obtain absolutely fantastic recording capabilities just

because of their very large, three-dimensional structure.

The other thing, which comes from their entangled nature,

is the fact that you can make films from these surfaces.

You can work out the fabrication process in such a way

that you can integrate that into many different carriers,

into polymeric carriers, which are biocompatible, and can

automatically integrate this whole system

into a standalone device.

So when you take all of these together and use the carbon

nanotube as a scaffold, and now bring

into this party, the quantum rods,

now you have a system that can do both.

It can anchor or bind to the biological system,

but it can also do the energy transfer

of taking photons and converting them

into charge separation, which ultimately stimulate

the retina.

Now there's a lot of science in the science

fiction in the sense that you really

have to work out a lot of details.

There are many, many, many details,

and I have exactly 32 seconds to lay them out.

But you really have to work about how you couple the carbon

nanotubes and the quantum dots.

You really have to make sure that the system

is stable and biocompatible, that the charge transfer

happens in such a way that it doesn't damage the system.

And all of these things have to be, of course, proven.

But once you do that, you actually realize that it works.

And you can demonstrate again, using blind retina, ex vivo,

that using nice, sharply-defined optical pulses,

that you can stimulate the retina

and reconstruct visual information in essentially

a blind system.

So there's a long way to go in order

to fill the full picture of this.

But this is where we're at at the moment

and really looking forward for the future.

So just to conclude, the real challenge

is really at the bottom, not just to extend life,

but really to make sure that this prolonged life is

happy, healthy, and independent.

So thank you very much.