8 Incredible Medical Breakthroughs That Are Right Around The Corner

With 285 million people worldwide estimated to be visually impaired, the development of a visual prosthesis would certainly be a game changer.

Of course, there are lots different reasons why a person might lose their sight, and lots of varying degrees of blindness, so to find a one-size-fits-all cure is probably highly unlikely. Scientists have been looking for a way to develop an artificial eye as far back as 1755 when Charles Leroy passed an electrical current through a blind man's optic nerve and, actually, the technology hasn't changed much.

A team of researchers in Australia are currently in the process of developing a retinal prosthesis that can be implanted into the brain. Patients with retinitis pigmentosa, a common form of blindness caused by the degeneration of photoreceptor cells in the retina, will be the first to test out the new technology.

The device consists of a pair of glass with a camera mounted on them which sends signals to the implanted microchip which in turn converts them into electrical signals to stimulate the remaining healthy receptors in the retina, traveling down the optic nerve and into the visual centres of the brain. Not entirely dissimilar to Leroy's experiment, just much more hi-tech.

Another common cause of blindness is an occlusion such as cataracts, which obstruct the lens, preventing light from entering the otherwise normally function eye. A developing technology called a Virtual Retinal Display (VRD) would help to combat this condition through the use of lasers. The system would use a camera to record pick up light signals and transform them into a laser image that is projected onto the retina, essentially bypassing the blockage on the lens and allowing fairly high-quality vision to be restored.

We're still a few years off the technology becoming widespread, but we've pretty much nailed the principles, meaning that it's not so much a case of "if" as "when".