A wireless implant helped patients with severe macular degeneration regain usable vision. The results point toward a new future for vision restoration.
A wireless retinal implant has been shown to restore central vision in people with advanced age-related macular degeneration (AMD), according to clinical trial findings recently released in the New England Journal of Medicine. Advanced atrophic AMD, also called geographic atrophy (GA), is the primary cause of permanent blindness in older adults and affects more than 5 million individuals worldwide.
GA occurs when photoreceptors and the underlying retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) progressively degenerate, disrupting the retina’s ability to convert light into neural signals. This loss of central retinal tissue, often accompanied by thinning of the choriocapillaris and buildup of metabolic debris such as drusen, leads to irreversible central vision loss even as peripheral vision remains intact.
The international trial, conducted across multiple centers, was jointly led by José-Alain Sahel, M.D., director of the UPMC Vision Institute, Daniel Palanker, Ph.D., professor of ophthalmology at Stanford University, and Frank Holz, M.D., professor of ophthalmology at the University of Bonn in Germany.
Strong functional gains in visual acuity
Among the 32 people who completed one year of follow-up, 26 participants (81%) experienced clinically meaningful improvements in visual acuity, and 27 (84%) reported using prosthetic vision at home to read numbers or words. On average, participants gained 25 letters, which corresponds to about five lines on a standard eye chart. In total, 81% improved by 10 letters or more.
“It’s the first time that any attempt at vision restoration has achieved such results in a large number of patients,” said Sahel, senior author of the study and chair of the Department of Ophthalmology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. “More than 80% of the patients were able to read letters and words, and some of them are reading pages in a book. This is really something we couldn’t have dreamt of when we started on this journey, together with Daniel Palanker, 15 years ago.”
How AMD destroys central vision
As AMD advances, the center of a person’s vision becomes increasingly blurred because the light-sensing cells in the central retina deteriorate permanently. In a healthy retina, these cells collect light from the environment and convert it into electrical signals, which are sent to nerve cells along the back of the eye and ultimately transmitted to the brain through the optic nerve.
The PRIMA system, originally designed by Palanker, replaces these lost photoreceptors with a 2×2 mm wireless implant that converts light into electrical signals to stimulate remaining retinal cells. A camera mounted on specialized glasses captures images and projects them onto the implant using invisible near-infrared light. The implant then converts the light into electrical pulses, restoring the flow of visual information to the brain. Patients can adjust zoom and contrast settings to enhance functional vision.
The PRIMAvera trial enrolled 38 participants aged 60 and older at 17 sites across five European countries: France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.
One-year safety and performance outcomes
After one year of using the system, all procedure-related adverse events had subsided, and the majority of participants showed significant improvement in their ability to read letters on the eye chart. One participant improved by as many as 59 letters, or 12 lines.
“While we can’t yet restore full 20/20 vision with the implant alone, at UPMC we are investigating methods that could further improve people’s quality of life and take them above the threshold for legal blindness,” Sahel said.
Based on the results of the new study, the device manufacturer, Science Corporation, has applied for clinical use authorization in Europe and the United States. UPMC was the first U.S. center to implant the PRIMA device in 2020 in a study led by associate professor of ophthalmology Joseph Martel, M.D.
Reference: “Subretinal Photovoltaic Implant to Restore Vision in Geographic Atrophy Due to AMD” by Frank G. Holz, Yannick Le Mer, Mahiul M.K. Muqit, Lars-Olof Hattenbach, Andrea Cusumano, Salvatore Grisanti, Laurent Kodjikian, Marco Andrea Pileri, Frederic Matonti, Eric Souied, Boris V. Stanzel, Peter Szurman, Michel Weber, Karl Ulrich Bartz-Schmidt, Nicole Eter, Marie Noelle Delyfer, Jean François Girmens, Koen A. van Overdam, Armin Wolf, Ralf Hornig, Martina Corazzol, Frank Brodie, Lisa Olmos de Koo, Daniel Palanker and José-Alain Sahel, 20 October 2025, New England Journal of Medicine.
DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2501396
Funding: Science Corporation, Alameda, CA, National Institute for Health and Care Research Biomedical Research Centre based at Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, UCL Institute of Ophthalmology
Never miss a breakthrough: Join the SciTechDaily newsletter.
Follow us on Google and Google News.