While effective, the downside to these approaches to vision rescue is that each disease requires its own form of gene therapy to correct the particular genetic mutation involved, a time consuming and complex process.

Hoping to develop a treatment that works more broadly across diseases, a Penn Vet team used canine disease models to closely examine how retinal gene activity varied during the progression of three different forms of inherited vision disease. Their results turned up an unexpected commonality: Early on in each of the diseases, genes involved in the same specific pathway of cell death appeared to be activated. These findings point to possible interventions that could curb vision loss across a variety of inherited retinal diseases.