DURHAM, N.C. (WNCN) — Born with a genetic eye disease, Tyler Wilfong knew from a young age he’d eventually lose his vision.
Bit by bit, it became more difficult for the Lincolnton man to see. Then, he received gene therapy at Duke, and it changed his view.
One of the most beautiful sights a parent can see is the face of their newborn baby.
“It is amazing,” Tyler Wilfong said.
Amazing, not just to become a dad, but to see his child in a way he once thought impossible. Wilfong has retinitis pigmentosa or RP, a genetic condition that causes vision to deteriorate.
“It progresses to where it’s pretty much blindness,” Wilfong noted, adding that his peripheral and night vision were the first to start failing. “I had my license up until I was 23, and then my peripheral vision got too bad,” he explained. He relied on his wife even to walk through a store. “I was losing a lot of independence,” he added.
On top of that, he knew the vision loss would keep getting worse.
“It was inevitable, but I kept my faith in God and I just had a feeling that one day something would change,” he recalled. “And you know, 30 some years later, here comes this opportunity.”
He learned the Duke Eye Center offers a gene therapy that could change the course of his disease. Dr. Oleg Alekseev, an Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology at Duke, explained how the therapy works.
“There’s a gene that is important for the retina to work properly, and a mutation in that gene renders it not functional, and so what we try to do is to bring a healthy copy of that gene into the eye through an injection,” he said.
Doctors use a virus to do that. Dr. Lejla Vajzovic, an associate professor of Opthalmology at Duke noted, “This virus is specifically developed to infect the cells in the back part of the eye to really serve as a vehicle to deliver the new gene, a good gene.”
Wilfong received the therapy on one eye in the spring, and within days, he noticed something remarkable. “I could actually see my fingers in front of my face, which I’ve never been able to do,” he said.
He’s scheduled to have surgery on his other eye this fall, and while he doesn’t know how much his vision will improve, he no longer fears losing all of his sight.
“That’s a big sense of relief,” he stated.
Duke Eye Center is the only place in the Carolinas that currently offers this therapy, and doctors are clear that it won’t work for everyone; problems with many different genes can cause vision loss.
“This applies to only those patients who have this particular gene affected,” noted Alekseev. “This gene represents less than 1% of all retinitis pigmentosa genes out there, so for the other about 100,000 Americans living with RP, they’re still waiting for their treatments, and so we really have our work cut out for us to find those treatments.”
Duke researchers are working on finding other treatments, and doctors say this is just the beginning, but they believe it is promising.
“It has only fueled really an explosion in gene therapy research, not only for the eye, but all also for all the other inherited diseases,” Vajzovic said.
For Wilfong the therapy came at the perfect time. He can now see well enough to care for his newborn son. “It’s made of a world of difference,” he marveled. “Just simple tasks that you don’t even think of, like changing his clothes.”
He can’t wait to watch his little boy grow. “It’s been a blessing,” he said.
