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June 16, 2026Several months ago, the beautiful singing voice of Christian Guardino earned this 17-year-old teenage boy an appearance on the television program “America’s Got Talent.”
Guardino was blind from birth, but now he can see after undergoing treatment for his inherited vision impairment with gene therapy.
Guardino inherited a vision disorder called Leber Congenital Amaurosis, or LCA. People with this defect lack a protein essential for the retina, the innermost tissue layer of the eyeball, which is composed of a large number of light-sensitive cone and rod cells. It is the area responsible for receiving light or images and sending signals to the brain to help us see and understand what we see.
When Christian Guardino was still an infant, his mother noticed an abnormality in his vision. Elizabeth Guardino said that while feeding her son, he would not look at her face but would instead stare at the source of light in the room.
After doctors diagnosed her son with the inherited vision disorder LCA, she did not know what to do because no family member had ever had this disease, since the genetic defect had likely been hidden for several generations.
But in the end, the research community discovered a way to treat this defect. At the age of 12, Christian Guardino participated in a trial to treat the LCA vision impairment with a gene therapy called Luxturna, in which doctors injected a genetically engineered virus carrying a healthy eye gene into the patient's retina.
Dr. Jean Bennett of the University of Pennsylvania said that after receiving therapy with the healthy retinal gene, the vision of patients in the treatment trial began to improve and they started to see within just 1 month. And while his level of vision is not yet perfect, he is no longer considered legally blind.
He said that getting to look at the moon, the sun, the stars, and the sunset is the most wonderful thing in the world.
However, the only drawback at present is that the cost of treating vision impairment with this gene therapy is still expensive.
Experts point out that there are more than 260 genes that may cause retinal disorders, which affect around 3 million people worldwide.
(Compiled by Taksina Khaikaew, VOA Thai Service, Washington)
