Hungarian-born researcher to receive the Nobel Prize for giving blind people back their sight? – video

Dr Botond Roska received the 2019 Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine because of his important discoveries enabling the restoration of vision in retinal disorders. Many regard the award as the anteroom of the Nobel-prize.

Impressive curriculum vitae

Dr Roska is currently working in Basel, Switzerland, but received his medical degree from Semmelweis University, Budapest. According to blikk.hu, he is the first Hungarian to get Louis-Jeantet Prize ever.

To be specific, he and his research group mapped how different cell types in the visual system extract visual information from the environment. Based on molecular mechanisms, they have developed novel gene therapies allowing the restoration of the vision for those who lost it because of genetic disorders. The Swiss research group developed special visual sensors that can be placed in the blind retina. These can interact with strategically important retinal cell types. Thus, they are able to

restore the delivery of visual information to the central nervous system of the patient.

Roska was born in in 1969 and obtained his medical degree at Semmelweis University, Budapest. Later he studied in the United States and got his PhD in neurobiology from the University of California, Berkeley. He also studied genetics and virology at Harvard University. He is currently working as co-director of the Institute of Ophthalmology Basel (IOB) where his research group operates. According to semmelweis.hu,  part of his research is pursued at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research (FMI).