Interview: stemming vision loss with stem cells: seeing is believing

Professor Coffey joined the faculty at the University of Oxford in 1987 on completing his doctoral work. In 1989, he was awarded a personal Royal Society Research Fellowship, at the same time moving to the University of Sheffield to establish a new laboratory for retinal transplantation. After 14 years at the University of Sheffield, Prof. Coffey was appointed Professor in the newly built Henry Wellcome building for translational eye research at the Institute of Ophthalmology in London. Prof. Coffey has many years experience in cellular therapies as applied to retinal transplantation and was recently the principal author and co-author of two landmark papers demonstrating that grafting human cells could prevent visual loss. As Professor and head of Ocular Biology and Therapeutics, Prof. Coffey has established the London Project to Cure Blindness. This project aims to deliver a stem cell therapy for age-related macular degeneration by 2011.