The use of your own stem cells for retinal regeneration has been suggested before, but at E10,545 or equivalent for both eyes it is very expensive. The price and elite availability of such procedures puts it out of reach for most of us.

Now an article published in The Guardian on January 30, 2009 suggests stem cell therapy for macular degeneration may become affordable.

The article continues: "But it is likely that the first embryonic stem cell therapy to become widely available will come from Britain … enabling those who were going blind to see. The work being done by Coffey, who is based at the University College London Institute of Ophthalmology, has the beauty of simplicity. Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is caused by the deterioration of retinal pigment epithelial (RPE) cells at the back of the eye. These cells form a layer that processes light, and do not need to be linked in to the nervous system and the brain. "We’re not having to reconnect cells to a neural network," says Coffey. "This is a carpet of cells." He and his team have done it very successfully in animals, he says. They have persuaded embryonic stem cells to turn into RPE cells and in effect laid a new carpet.

"We’re now manufacturing the cells to clinical standard so we can go into trials in 2010/11," he says, adding with enthusiasm that it is do-able because they need relatively few. "We only need 40,000 cells. It sounds an awful lot but if you think of a computer mouse," he says, looking around the room for something the right size, "if you grew the cells in it you could provide easily enough for 100,000 patients. The scale-up is relatively simple."

Coffey thinks this therapy has a good chance of success. A quarter of pensioners will hope he is right. That’s how many over-65s get AMD. And while there is a new (very expensive) drug called Lucentis for one form of the disease, it is not a cure. AMD is, as he says, "a huge problem".

But funding has not been easy. Coffey was kept afloat by the UK’s Macular Disease Society, which gave him £50,000 at a tricky point. Otherwise the money has come from philanthropic donors in the US, of whom Bush’s ban made sure there was no shortage.

Interestingly, if it proves to be a cure for macular degeneration, this therapy is likely to be affordable. Not only that, it will save the NHS a lot of money. The costs of surgery, Coffey reckons, will be about £4,000-£5,000, but the patch of cells itself could cost as little as £250. Lucentis costs £800 to £1,500 for each injection every four to six weeks. "But this is a cure - not like Lucentis," says Coffey. That’s the argument that has at last caused the big pharma companies to sit up and take notice. For years they steered clear of biotechnology. Living tissue was of far less interest to them than chemical compounds that patients would take for years. But a new reality is dawning. Stem cell therapies could drive their drugs off the market.

Other new treatment technologies currently under research include a computer chip implant in the retina, and gene technology.