The world's biggest vision prize is Portuguese, and this year it went to the pair who gave a blind patient some sight back
Botond Roska and José-Alain Sahel have won the 2026 António Champalimaud Vision Award, worth one million euros. It recognises two decades of work on optogenetic therapies, which make surviving retinal cells respond to light after the eye's photoreceptors are gone.
There is a one-million-euro science prize that leaves Lisbon every year and is the largest in its field anywhere in the world. It is the António Champalimaud Vision Award, given by the Champalimaud Foundation, and the 2026 edition now has its winners: Botond Roska and José-Alain Sahel.
Roska is a neuroscientist and a founding director of the Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology in Basel. Sahel is an ophthalmologist and clinician-scientist at the University of Pittsburgh who chairs that institute’s scientific advisory board. They have worked together for more than twenty years.
What they actually did
They went at ophthalmology’s hardest problem: what to do once the eye’s photoreceptors — the cells that catch light — are dead. Disease takes them and does not give them back. The approach they helped build is called optogenetics, and it solves the problem from the other end. Rather than recover the lost cells, it makes other surviving retinal cells respond to light, handing them a job they were never designed for.
In 2021, Roska, Sahel and their collaborators reported in Nature Medicine the result that moved this from promise to clinical fact: a blind patient with retinitis pigmentosa partially recovered visual function. Partially is the load-bearing word. This is not sight as it was. It is telling shapes apart, locating them, picking up an object off a table.
Why it counts as a Portuguese story
Because the money and the judgement are Portuguese. The Champalimaud Foundation has run this award since 2007, alternating between years given to research and years given to fighting blindness in developing regions, and a million euros is still more than any other distinction in the field offers. It is one of the few places where Portugal sets the international frontier of an entire field rather than following it — from a building in Pedrouços that most people know by its silhouette rather than by what gets decided inside it.
The prize money will fund the next phase of the pair’s research. The target Roska and Sahel have named publicly is to raise what the therapy returns: from telling shapes apart to recognising faces.
One caveat any honest reading of these announcements needs. An award-winning therapy is not a therapy your ophthalmologist can offer next month, and the distance between a published trial and routine treatment is measured in years. It is still science moving the right way — and worth noting that applications for the 2027 edition are open until 31 December. As with a good deal of frontier research, this one has a Portuguese foot in it without making the front pages.
Photo: Vitor Oliveira / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0) · file photograph
