D'Angelo Foundation
Curing Retinal Blindness
We are a group of families. We have kids that are beautiful, talented, athletic, gifted, entertaining, funny. We are working to add one more characteristic to the list: sighted. Our kids are blind from a genetic disease called Leber’s Congenital Amaurosis (LCA). All of our children have the CRB1 gene that is responsible for this blindness. For years, a few big vision research groups have been funding research to cure all different types of blindness. But the research on CRB1 was not a top priority. To our families, it’s PRIORITY #1. Some of us had asked the large foundations to make CRB1 research a priority. We had no luck. So we decided to be bold enough to ask an incredible team of doctors and researchers if, given the necessary funding, they would make our gene a priority. They agreed!
Through the incredible avenue of social networking, our group grew from 2 families to 10 in about 14 days! We now have 11 families committed to raising the money needed to fund the research and advance the CRB1 gene replacement therapy into clinical trials. It’s a big commitment, and compared to the other “big blindness foundations” we are really small! However, when the gift of sight for your child is just a few fundraisers away, the motivation to succeed is HUGE!!!!!
we believe very soon our beautiful children will be able to SEE themselves in the mirror, they’ll SEE the faces of the audience they perform for, they’ll SEE the ball they hit go over the outfield fence, they’ll SEE the trophies, medals and honors they have received. Best of all, they’ll SEE the faces of us, their parents, beaming with pride.
Time is very much of the essence: our children are losing healthy retina cells every day, so the faster we get the gene replaced in each of them, the better chance they have to get as close to 20/20 vision as we dream they will!
