Dr. Margalit to receive the Gilmore award

Eyal Margalit, M.D., Ph.D., has been named the 2010 Joseph P. Gilmore Award recipient for his work to develop an electronic retinal implant to restore vision in blind patients.









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Eyal Margalit, M.D., Ph.D.
The implant is a multi-electrode prosthetic device, which will electrically stimulate viable retinal elements in a pattern and bypass degenerated retinal elements.

Though diseases like retinitis pigmentosa and age related macular degeneration damage the eyes’ photoreceptors — the cells responsible for vision — other cells in the retina stay intact, Dr. Margalit said.

“In the late ’80s and early ’90s, the idea came about to use electricity for retinal cells’ stimulation,” Dr. Margalit said. “Ideally, the electrical stimulation would cause the brain to see light and create an image.”












About the Gilmore award



Dr. Margalit will receive the Gilmore award during a ceremony on Thursday, April 15 at 2 p.m. in the Durham Research Center Auditorium. During the ceremony, he will have a presentation about his research.

The award is named for the late Joseph P. Gilmore, Ph.D., who was professor and chairman of the UNMC Department of Physiology and Biophysics from 1970 to 1987.

The award was established upon his retirement to recognize outstanding research contributions by young UNMC faculty members.




During a research fellowship at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Dr. Margalit helped develop the first retinal implant.

He came to UNMC in 2003, while researchers from Johns Hopkins (now at the University of Southern California) continued work on the retinal implant. They now seek U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval on a device with approximately 60 electrodes.

It is estimated, however, that it takes a minimum of 600 electrodes to stimulate the retina cells before humans begin to see enough detail for face recognition.

In collaboration with the Naval Research Laboratory and with funds from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the Nebraska Research Initiative, Dr. Margalit plans to improve an existing device with one that contains 3,200 electrodes.

It will be three to five years before Dr. Margalit’s device is tested in clinical trials.