Canine Cures: How Dog Genes May Help the Blind See

Oct. 15— Long before Shadow the poodle attained fame for becoming the first dog to be genetically mapped, a shaggy briard named Lancelot had already been shaking paws with lawmakers in Washington.

Since 2001, Lancelot has been a living model of how vision can be restored to the blind, and the gene therapy treatment that gave the briard sight is currently being vetted for human trials. But now that scientists have Shadow's mapped genome as a tool for finding new genes, there may be more medical miracles like Lancelot to come.  

 \"Many genetic diseases in dogs resemble human diseases and probably share the same genes,\" said Ewen Kirkness, the leader of the team at the Center for Advancement of Genomics in Rockville, Md., that decoded Shadow's genes. \"This will make the hunt for those genes easier.\"

Click to expand...