Pittsburgh’s José-Alain Sahel honored with Wolf Prize for groundbreaking research on sight restoration

Dr. José-Alain Sahel refers to his patients as heroes. The same can been said of him.

Sahel, chair and distinguished professor in the Department of Ophthalmology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, was awarded the 2024 Wolf Prize in Medicine for his work using optogenetics to restore vision to blind people.

The Wolf Prize, conferred in Israel by the Wolf Foundation, is considered one of the world’s most prestigious recognitions for scientific and artistic achievements, according to Forbes. The prize, which has been awarded since 1978, carries a monetary award of $100,000 for each of its laureates, who are selected by juries comprised of experts from around the world.

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“Over a third of the Wolf Prize laureates have subsequently received the Nobel Prize in corresponding disciplines,” according to the Wolf Foundation.

Nine laureates were named this year in medicine, mathematics, physics, agriculture and music.

Sahel was awarded the Wolf Prize along with his colleague Botond Roska, founding director of the Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology Basel and professor at the Faculty of Medicine and the Faculty of Science at the University of Basel, Switzerland.

Sahel and Roska were recognized for their work in “pioneering a novel vision restoration approach by designing and applying optogenetic technology to render surviving neurons in the eye light-sensitive, functionally replacing photoreceptors lost to damage and genetic disease,” according to the Wolf Foundation. “This combination of powerful fundamental human neurobiological discovery research of Roska, with a deep knowledge of the clinical and translational ophthalmology of Sahel, has led to a major milestone in the fight against blindness and in the field of optogenetics more broadly.”

In 2021, Sahel and Roska’s groundbreaking clinical study was published in Nature Medicine. The study was conducted in Pittsburgh, Paris and London, and the findings were the result of more than 10 years of work, Sahel said.

The study focused “on trying to reactivate what we call dormant cells in the retina,” Sahel told the Chronicle. “We are dealing with, in that case, genetic conditions that lead to the degeneration of the photoreceptor cells that capture the light and trigger vision. These cells die as a consequence of a genetic defect, and because this is the first step of vision, many patients go blind, as they don’t usually have any useful vision left. So the idea was to use a mechanism that exists in elementary organisms like algae — very rudimentary organisms that are using the same protein to capture the light and to trigger electrical responses in the cells. And we thought that this could be used, maybe, to reactivate the cells, because instead of replacing all the machinery that is broken, we would use only one protein to do all of that. It took us many, many years to develop that into a therapy.”

“It was a multi-faceted process, and we tested that, step by step, over several years,” he continued. “And eventually, once we identified what we thought was the best and safest combination, we started to test that in patients.”

Because of the pandemic, some patients were unable to complete the study. But a first patient in Paris, who lived near the hospital, continued. That patient, Sahel said, “was totally blind. He recovered part of his vision — not fully though — from this approach.”

The patient was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa when he was a teenager; by the time he was 40, he had lost his vision. He stopped working and “started to have a very, very remote life — I mean, just staying home and not doing much of what he used to do,” Sahel said. “And eventually he was the first patient in the study — a very articulate patient, wonderful patient — and he was the first to report his benefit.”

Within months of treatment, the patient could locate and move objects placed before him.

This was the first time that this type of technology was used in any field of medicine, Sahel noted.

The publication was reported by The New York Times and other large media outlets.

“This was a big splash,” Sahel said, “but actually for us, it was just the first step.”

Sahel and his colleagues are continuing their work and are “currently analyzing the data from other patients in the study,” he said, while developing the “next generation of this therapy.”

“In science, nothing is ever finished,” Sahel said. “You just continue working constantly. But this was a big milestone.”

“Importantly,” he added, it was also the result of “a lot of teamwork. I get the credit with my colleague but it was actually the work of many, many people, in Paris, Basel and Pittsburgh.”

Not least of which are the patients.

“It’s all about patients,” Sahel stressed. “I mean, everything we do is really learning from patients. Even the success we could have in some of our patients is really a consequence of their involvement, engagement, and actually a unique motivation to be part of the study. So these people are heroes, actually, because they are exploring the unknown with us.”

Sahel, who was born in Algeria to a “modest Jewish family,” studied medicine at University Denis Diderot, Paris VII, and Ophthalmology at University Louis Pasteur Strasbourg University and Harvard. He founded and, from 2008 to 2020, directed the Vision Institute in Paris.

About eight years ago, Sahel decided to leave France with his family because of rising antisemitism there.

“I thought that there was no real future for my family, my grandchildren,” he said. “Mostly, I was very concerned about my grandchildren’s future. And so we started to explore several opportunities.”

The world-renowned ophthalmologist had offers at some of the most prestigious universities in the U.S., but ultimately came to Pittsburgh, thanks to the recruiting efforts of Dr. Arthur Levine, senior vice chancellor emeritus of Health Sciences and John and Gertrude Petersen dean emeritus at Pitt’s School of Medicine — and the assistance of Levine’s wife, Linda Melada, a realtor, who was able to find Sahel and his daughter’s family homes within walking distance of Orthodox congregations in Squirrel Hill.

The recruitment was supported by Jeff Romoff, then UPMC president — who also commissioned the Vision Institute at the Mercy campus, which replicates the research and clinical institute that Sahel established in Paris — and Leslie Davis, then UPMC senior vice president.

“Dr. Sahel is unique in many ways,” Levine said. “He is a fine retinal surgeon who is also deeply trained and accomplished in basic research. He has a level and breadth of intellectual profundity which reaches far beyond ophthalmology, but early on he recognized that the eye is both a part of, and a window into, the brain — thus he is a wonderful neuroscientist, as well as being a broad and immensely creative scholar. He is exceptionally literate and knowledgeable about the arts and philosophy as well as science and medicine.”

Levine also noted that Sahel is an “accomplished entrepreneur, having started up a number of companies based on research which he directed.”

Sahel has been in Pittsburgh since 2016, and said that he and his family are very happy here.

“People are very kind, very friendly, also very humble,” he said. “It’s a beautiful community.”

Sahel still has strong ties to Paris and travels there regularly, including as a scientific advisor to the French president.

He was in Israel in December and again in March. While there, he spoke to medical residents, discussing his research and careers in science and medicine. The audience included residents who were soldiers in Gaza, as well as several Palestinians, selected by the Palestinian Authority, who train at Hadassah Hospital.

“So in this so-called apartheid country, in the same room, I was talking to a diversity of residents, some of them being Palestinians, some Jewish soldiers, and working together in the same department,” Sahel said. “I had an inspiring discussion together with all of them. Some of the Hadassah trainees actually come to spend some extended time with us in my department in Pittsburgh,” including a Palestinian doing a research fellowship.

The award ceremony for the Wolf Prize — which will be presented by Israel’s President Isaac Herzog — will be held after Israel’s war with Hamas ends, Sahel said. But he will visit the Jewish state before then: His mother and two sisters live there and he is an adjunct professor at Hebrew University. PJC

Toby Tabachnick can be reached at ttabachnick@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.

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