It has been a great start to Tasmanian Eye Institute’s fund raising campaign, as we’ve reached the target for me to go bald.
It’s been a fun journey as my hair has changed from bleached then blue and now bald, i even gave a lecture at one of our eye conferences dressed up as thing 1 from Dr Seuss’ cat in the hat. So I want to thank everyone who has supported Tasmanian Eye Institute so far as we raise funds to build Australia’s first dedicated Ophthalmic Gene Therapy Centre.
So far we have raised over $80,000 towards our goal of $2,000,000 and construction is well underway at the gene therapy home in Lenah Valley.
This is an important project in support of Professor Alex Hewitt, a world expert in Ophthalmic genetics. Collectively genetic eye diseases are the largest cause of irreversible blindness, and gene therapy will be one of the major ways that devastating blinding conditions will be cured.
CRISPR is the game changing technology that will provide personalised cures, targetting the individual problem each affected person has. One of the biggest obstacles in finding genetic cures has been removing the bad gene. The CRISPR-Cas system provides a very precise pair of genetic scissors that cuts out the bad gene and allows replacing it with the correct gene - all personalised to each person’s problem (a bit like delivering the specific chemotherapy someone needs with cancer treatments).
So again thank you to all our supporters and a big shout out to Sass Hair salon at Newstead who have enthusiastically helped my hair journey.