Hope for Vision's Usher III Initiative featured on NBC!
Help Rebecca and all of those who are courageously living each day in hope of a cure!
Recently, NBC aired a compelling story by News Correspondent Peter Alexander, about his sister Rebecca who is losing her sight and hearing. Rebecca and thousands of others like her suffer from Usher syndrome, type III - a devastating genetic disorder that leads to complete blindness and deafness.
Donate to research for “the Usher III initiative” through Hope for Vision by clicking here.
To read more about Rebecca on Peter Alexander’s Blog, click here.
The Usher III Initiative
As part of Hope for Vision’s mission to fund the development of treatments and cures for blinding diseases, we are honored to be partnering with the Elden family on the Usher III Initiative: a program specifically developed to bring together prestigious researchers from around the world to study the Usher IIIa disease.
Usher III is a progressive combination of hearing and vision loss that is usually diagnosed when a person is in their teens.
The Usher III Initiative Fund was started by Richard Elden who has only one goal in mind – to help his daughter Cindy and others who have Usher IIIa.
With a strong motivation, namely the race against time to find something to preserve his daughter’s existing vision, Mr. Elden sought the advice of successful medical research organizations such as Prostate Cancer Research Foundation and other similarly designed organizations to create a research effort to focus on Usher IIIa disease. With the assistance of his daughter Cindy and David A. Saperstein, MD, a retina physician and biotechnology entrepreneur with specific research interests in inherited retinal disease, he has brought together an internationally renowned team of research scientists who are dedicated to finding a targeted treatment and cure for this devastating disorder.
The Usher III Initiative has taken several approaches in order to develop treatments specific for Usher III, as well as therapies that may prove to be effective in treating other inherited disorders.
The main research areas are:
1. Gene Therapy to replace the defective gene in the retina and ear.
2. Neuroprotection strategies to preserve vision in the retina and hearing in the ear.
3. Small molecule, chaperone therapy to help fix the abnormal protein in the eye.
4. Stem cell technology to create models of the human form of the disease.
What is unique about the Usher III Initiative is that scientists who are normally research competitors, are now working together for a common goal: to slow and ideally stop the progressive vision and hearing loss for Cindy and Rebecca and others with Ushers syndrome type III. In two short years, the group has made major advances towards finding these therapies. They continue to work hard to make the Elden family’s dream a reality.