Botond Roska and José-Alain Sahel receive António Champalimaud Vision Award

Botond Roska and José-Alain Sahel have been awarded the 2026 António Champalimaud Vision Award, a prestigious international prize valued at one million euros. The award recognizes over two decades of groundbreaking research in understanding, preserving, and restoring vision.

Their collaborative work has significantly advanced the field of optogenetic therapies. This approach aims to restore sight by making remaining functional cells in the retina light-sensitive in cases where natural light-sensing cells have been destroyed by disease. A notable milestone of their partnership was a 2021 publication in Nature Medicine, which reported the partial restoration of visual function in a patient blinded by retinitis pigmentosa using optogenetic methods.

Botond Roska is a neurobiologist and founding director of the Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology (IOB) in Basel. José-Alain Sahel is a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh and chair of the IOB Scientific Advisory Board. The Champalimaud Foundation established this award in 2006 to honor exceptional achievements in vision research and the fight against blindness.