Area couple donates $1 million to find blindness cure

Premier Electric owners Robert and Debbie Forbis have donated $1 million to the University of Florida to pay for research required to bring to the U.S. a new procedure that uses umbilical cord blood stem cells, typically considered medical waste, to cure blindness in children. Optic Nerve Hypoplasia, once a rare disease, but now the leading cause of blindness in newborns, causes the optic nerves that connect the eye to the brain to not develop properly during the first trimester of pregnancy.

The Forbis' grandchild, Taylor Forbis, was born last June with the disease. At the age of two months, Taylor's parents, Bobby and Sarah Forbis, began to notice Taylor was not looking at things. They had him examined and it was determined that Taylor had ONH. They were told there was no cure for this disease and Taylor would probably be blind for his entire life. They said there was a small chance that he may gain some sight up until the age of five.

Luckily for Taylor, his vision has increased gradually since he was three months old and he now sees his toys up to four feet away, and has just started crawling towards them. The family is hopeful that his vision will keep developing.

This is not the case in many children with this disease. They will spend their whole life in darkness.

Until last summer, when Dawn Barlett, a mother from Missouri, took her daughter Rylea to China for an experimental treatment, using umbilical cord blood stem cells, no one ever thought there would be a cure for this disease.

At the time Rylea was five years and ten months old and had been totally blind for her entire life. She was past the age where doctors say the vision could occur on its own, and had no gradual growth in vision up until that time, which is typical for kids with ONH who end up with some limited vision.

Within one week of being injected intravenously with one million stem cells, she could see a penlight. The doctors were shocked. After four more injections into her spinal cord over the next three weeks, her vision kept improving and she now sees with 20/800 vision and wears glasses.

The Forbis' are hoping that this donation will spur others to donate more money to help get this cure developed, which will allow the research to proceed much more quickly. If you would like to donate to this, contact the University of Florida and/or contact your congressmen and tell them to support funding for this project as there is currently no government funding of any kind to find a cure for this disease.