Flash News April 2024
Flash News for April 3, 2024
Reminder - ACB Maine will hold a board meeting on Thursday, April 4, 2024 at 7:30 PM.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/2073456789?omn=87842208169
Meeting ID: 207 345 6789
For more information about the board meeting, consult the April Newsletter at this link.
A Historic Eclipse with Inclusive Live Aira Visual Interpretation Coverage!
Join Aira and the South East Area Coalition of Rochester, NY, on April 8th for the “Total Eclipse of the Park” event at Genesee Valley Park, situated directly in the path of totality. This once-in-a-lifetime solar eclipse viewing experience will be enhanced with Aira's live visual interpretation, ensuring the blind and low vision community can partake in the astronomical spectacle alongside 31 million others in the path of totality.
What to Expect: From 2:00pm to 4:00pm Eastern time, Aira's visual interpreters will bring the eclipse to life via Aira’s YouTube channel, adding insights on the appearance of the sky, the sun’s corona during totality, and capturing the reactions of park patrons as day turns to night. This live broadcast will be streamed throughout Genesee Valley Park during the totality, making it a truly inclusive event. Access Aira's YouTube channel here:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvTWpoo6BVrn2pOFreWQGGw
Thank you Ginger for sending this article along.
Friends of FFB - This is a notice from Dan Day of
Foundation Fighting Blindness regarding new advances in treatment for
Retina Pigmentosis.
I know I’ve mentioned optogenetics as an approach that holds promise to restore vision for those with severe vision loss. As you may recall, optogenetics is a special kind of gene therapy that enables the ganglion and bipolar cells that connect the retina to the optic nerve to perform the function of lost photoreceptor cells. I know I’ve also mentioned that this area of research has been moving quite rapidly, and a rather exciting announcement was just released.
One of the companies doing optogenetics trials is Nanoscope Therapeutics. They just announced on March 26 some results from an RP trial that sound quite encouraging. Nanoscope will ask the FDA in the second half of this year to allow them to put their MCO-010 optogenetic treatment on the market. It’s easy to get overly exuberant about an announcement that promises better vision, but this one truly sounds like a cause for some excitement. I’ll give you the Nanoscope URL with the announcement so you can read it yourself, but they seem to have gotten some pretty impressive results with patients who have severe vision loss from RP, and the results are gene agnostic, i.e., do not depend on any specific RP mutation. For sure, we need more details to know the true significance of this announcement, but this will be the first treatment after Luxturna that restores significant vision to those with severe vision loss, assuming it works as well as the article suggests, and they get their approval from the FDA to make it available. Here is the URL:
No matter how this turns out, it does highlight just how fast things are beginning to move and is good cause for hope that something helpful is not very far away. Of course, you’ll hear from me right away whenever I get any breaking news.
From our Friends at PTGDU
This article recently appeared in Mainebiz and conerns all people who own service animals.
Click this link
Maine businesss maybe be barking up the wrong tree
Thank you Ginger for the article and the reference
End of Flash News - April 3, 2024.