Botond Roska

Botond Roska

Title: “Restoring Vision”

Abstract: In my talk, I will discuss blindness as a major unmet medical need. I will demonstrate how our understanding of the structure and function of the retina, combined with new molecular and viral tools, allows us to target light sensors to specific cell types in the human retina. This so-called optogenetic therapy has enabled us to partially restore visual function in blind patients.

Bio: Botond Roska obtained his MD at the Semmelweis Medical School, a PhD in neurobiology from the University of California, Berkeley and studied genetics and virology as a Harvard Society Fellow at Harvard University and the Harvard Medical School. He then led a research group at the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel from 2005-2018. In 2010, he became Professor at the Medical Faculty and in 2019 Professor at the Science Faculty of the University of Basel. Since 2018, he has been a founding director of the Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology Basel (IOB). At IOB, he leads a research group focusing on the understanding of vision and its diseases and the development of gene therapies to restore vision.
Botond Roska was elected as a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO, 2011), the Academia Europaea (2020), the Hungarian Academy of Science (2022) and the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (2023). He has received several awards, including the Viva Award in 2010, the Alcon Award in 2011, the Alfred Vogt Award in 2013, the Cogan Award in 2016, the Bressler Prize and the W. Alden Spencer Award in 2018, the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine, the Cloëtta Prize, the Semmelweis Budapest Award in 2019, the Körber European Science Prize, the Greenberg End Blindness Visionary Prize in 2020, the International Prize for Translational Neuroscience in 2023 and the Wolf Prize in Medicine in 2024.

Affiliation: Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology Basel, Switzerland