Center for Vision Restoration of UPMC and Pitt Receives Multi-Million Dollar Gift to be Matched by UPMC
Watch video of the press conference.
At a press conference on June 18, the Center for Vision Restoration of UPMC and the University of Pittsburgh announced a $3 million gift from Louis J. Fox, a Pennsylvania native and Pitt graduate. To honor his generosity, the Center will now be known as the Louis J. Fox Center for Vision Restoration. UPMC has pledged to match this donation.
Mr. Fox, a retired commodity merchant banker and trader, has embraced the Center’s mission to discover cures for blindness and vision impairment through a joint program of the UPMC Eye Center and McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine. One of the Center’s future projects will be to study artificial vision devices, like BrainPort, an investigational device that aims to give back sight through non-visual neural pathways. Cpl. Mike Jernigan, a medically retired Marine who lost both eyes in an explosion in Iraq, demonstrated the use of BrainPort at the press conference.