Global Prakash: Envisioning a Multi-national Collaboration to Advance Science and Service in Vision

We describe an ambitious proposal—Global Prakash, driven by the mission of providing treatment to curably blind children and undertaking scientific research to study the development of brain and behavior following treatment. Building on our experiences with an Indo-U.S. effort named Project Prakash, we motivate the need to scale up the work to be able to serve visually impaired children worldwide. We envision Global Prakash to be a strongly interlinked network of medical centers augmented with research capabilities, distributed across developing as well as developed nations, with each center serving the needs of visually impaired children in its region, and undertaking clinical and basic research studies. Global Prakash holds the promise to change the landscape for childhood disability alleviation and our understanding of how the brain adapts to alterations in developmental progressions. In addition to immediately benefiting children by providing them existing treatments, the scientific research undertaken in the network will, in the longer term, help provide a deeper understanding of brain development and its disorders and guidance toward potentially effective novel treatments. In addition to describing the basic structure of Global Prakash, we discuss some of the practical issues relevant to its implementation.