Recently floated spin-out Pixium Vision is also involved in the project.

Faculty at the Munich University of Technology have managed to use graphene as a basis for artificial retinas. The research has been conducted at the university’s Walter Schottky Institute.

Led by Jose Garrido, the team has figured out a way to use the carbon material’s unique properties. Graphene, which has a honeycomb-like structure, is only one single carbon atom thick. The material is so thin it is considered two dimensional and is almost entirely transparent. It is as flexible as rubber and roughly 100 times stronger than steel.

Munich has been working with researchers at the Institut de la Vision at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie and Pixium Vision, a retinal implant developer. Pixium was spun out of Université Pierre et Marie Curie and floated on Euronext Paris in July 2014 with an initial public offering of €34.5m ($46.7m) and a market capitalisation of €100.4m ($135.9m).

The artificial retina could be used to treat blind people whose optical nerves remain undamaged. It would work by translating light into electric impulses that the optical nerve could understand and transfer to the brain. Currently available technology tends to be rejected by the body, and even a successful implant is only able to produce limited results.

No commercialisation timeline has been announced. The work is being funded through the Graphene Project, set up by the EU’s Future and Emerging Technologies initiative worth €1bn ($1.32bn). The ten-year initiative is being managed by Gothenburg, Sweden-based Chalmers University of Technology.