José-Alain Sahel studied at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Paris, and completed his ophthalmology residency in Paris and Strasbourg. After a fellowship and visiting scholarship at Harvard University (Cambridge, Boston, USA), he was appointed Professor at the Louis Pasteur University in Strasbourg. He is Professor of Ophthalmology in the Faculty of Medicine at the Pierre-et-Marie-Curie University, and holds the Cumberlege Chair of Biomedical Sciences at the Institute of Ophthalmology-UniversityCollege of London. He heads an ophthalmology department at the Centre hospitalier national d'ophtalmologie (CHNO) des Quinze-Vingts and the Fondation ophtalmologique Rothschild in Paris. He founded and directs the Institut de la Vision (Pierre-et-Marie-Curie University-UPMC/Inserm/CNRS), which operates in synergy with the CHNO des Quinze-Vingts (over 250 employees).
José-Alain Sahel's fundamental and clinical research focuses on understanding the mechanisms of retinal degeneration, as well as the design, development and evaluation of innovative treatments for retinal diseases (neuroprotection, stem cells, gene therapy, pharmacology and artificial retina). José Sahel's group (with Saddek Mohand-Said and Thierry Léveillard) was the first to hypothesize and then demonstrate that a protein produced by rods enables cones to survive and thus maintain daytime, high-resolution vision. This protein, known as Rod-derived Cone Viability Factor (RdCVF), is currently the subject of translational studies with a view to administering it as a therapeutic agent to save cones and treat cone-rod dystrophies. When cones and rods have degenerated, optogenetics offers the prospect of partially restoring vision. José Sahel's group with Serge Picaud, Jens Duebel, Deniz Dalkara at the Vision Institute, Botond Roska at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel, and Ernst Bamberg(Max Plack Institute, Frankfurt, Germany) have demonstrated that different retinal cell types, such as "dormant cones", can be transformed into "artificial photoreceptors" by optogenetics, enabling the reactivation of circuits and signaling pathways in the retina and the restoration of vision-related behavioral progress.