Saxony: visually impaired rows with GDR professional athletes for research

Dresden (dpa/sn) - Anne Kinski from Rostock, who lives in Berlin and is affected by a rare degenerative retinal disease, wants to raise money for research with an Elbe rowing tour.

Saxony: visually impaired rows with GDR professional athletes for research

Dresden (dpa/sn) - Anne Kinski from Rostock, who lives in Berlin and is affected by a rare degenerative retinal disease, wants to raise money for research with an Elbe rowing tour. Together with world champions and Olympic champions from GDR times, the 600 river kilometers between Dresden and Hamburg should be completed in just under three weeks. The organizer is Ulrich Kons, eighth Olympic champion in 1980. He also persuaded former colleagues to raise awareness of previously incurable retinal diseases and the participation of people with visual impairments.

"I'm a beginner rower," Kinski said on Monday. Like her 21-hour Baltic Sea hiking tour over 100 kilometers in 2021, it is "an adventure". On August 15, she and Kons will cast off at the famous Dresden Elbbrücke Blaues Wunder. Alternating with gold medalists such as Wolfgang Mager, Hans-Joachim Lück and Dieter Schubert - Olympic champions in 1968 and 1972 and the oldest at 79 - so that the arrival in Hamburg on September 1 succeeds.

Kinski suffers from retinitis pigmentosa, in which the photoreceptor cells gradually die off. This leads to night blindness, tunnel vision, declining eyesight and eventually complete blindness. The 46-year-old hopes for new therapeutic approaches, which are being researched at the Dresden Center for Regenerative Therapies. Transplanting lab-grown photoreceptors could help overcome the loss of these photoreceptors in blinding diseases and partially restore vision, said project leader Marius Ader. Recently, this has been used to restore the perception of daylight in mice with degenerated eyesight.