EDMONTON -- Dean Scott could hardly see two years ago, but the Spirit River, Alta., carpenter says an experimental drug helped him regain some of his vision and added colour to his life.
Scott, 45, first noticed problems with his eyes when he was a child and lost his peripheral vision.
Around his 30th birthday, he could no longer read. "As it slowly got worse and worse, it just got to the point I would get lost in my backyard because I couldn’t see my house well enough," Scott told CTV News Edmonton.
Scott, who became a carpenter after he had to give up his career as a computer technician, could only see light and dark contrasts and relied on a tape measurer with marks on it every couple of feet.
Everything changed when the doctor who diagnosed him with Lebel's congenital amaurosis — a disease that damages the retina — told him about a new experimental drug in Iowa.
Scott went down to Iowa in May 2018 and qualified for the treatment. He says improvements were slow and gradual, but three months after he received the first round of injections to his eyes, Scott saw the first major change.
"I was sitting in a mall and just all of a sudden I noticed I could read the Old Navy sign above the store … it was still blurry but I could make out the Old Navy letters."
Slowly but surely, Scott was able to differentiate colours and read. His happiest moment was when he no longer had to rely on marks on his tape measurer to do his job because he could actually see the numbers.
After about 15 years, Scott says he almost had to learn how to read again. And after all this time, Christmas was even a little more magical as his eyes saw something new.
"Christmas this year was really brilliant. I'd never seen LED Christmas lights before … the colour would just pop."
Scott goes to Iowa every three months for more testing, check-ups and injections. If approved, ProQR, the company that created the experimental drug, Sepofarsen, hopes to launch it in 2022.
