Dr. David Sinclair

If you're blind, who cares?

It's two seconds of discomfort.

Now you've got the little virus, which I'm going to break off the stand here.

The little virus, there's billions of them, trillions of them in the eye.

Now they infect specifically the nerves at the back of the eye in the retina.

Because these little balls on the package direct it specifically by design, by our lab's design, just to those nerves at the back of the eye.

If we change these little proteins on the surface, we can send it to the liver or to the brain.

This is the zip code, the postcode for where we want to send our three genes.

But this one's designed for the eye.

It's called an AAV2.

Long story short, these are ready to go into humans.

We're just waiting for FDA approval to inject it into a blind patient to see what happens.

Not the protein.

What actually happens is when this goes in the eye, so what I'm holding up looks like a little ball with red dots on it.

It looks like a virus, but it's not.

It's a package.

Now, what happens is these trillions of little packages go into the fluid.

Now, they dock with the cells at the back of the eye.

They get inside the cell and they open up.

And out comes this little package that we've made.