GUESTS at a charity ball heard how their efforts were helping to fund sight-saving medical research.

Professor Andrew Lotery of Gift of Sight, told revellers at the event on Saturday that Southampton has been selected as a centre to sequence a patient’s entire genome.

“That means decoding the three billion pieces of information in a patient’s DNA to find the perhaps one change in a billion which causes their disease. This used to cost £20 million pounds per patient but now it can be done for less than £1,000,” said the Professor Lotery, who directs research at the charity’s labs at Southampton University.

“Having found a faulty gene we are now able, in some cases, to replace it with gene therapy and have started gene replacement clinical trials in some patients. This would have been science fiction just a few years ago but is reality now.

“We can also take a small sample of skin tissue from a patients arm and convert this into stem cells and then back to eye tissues in the laboratory. This too would have been science fiction a few years ago but is also a reality now. “

Former Meridian sports presenter Andy Steggall was master of ceremonies for the evening at the Botleigh Grange Hotel and after bringing people in for dinner he encouraged them to part with their cash early by participating in an icebreaker game of ‘Heads ‘n’ Tails’.

After dinner guests competed against each other for prizes in a balloon lottery, raffle and a silent auction then danced until midnight to the aptly-named band Innervision.

Gift of Sight announced this week that the event raised £4,500.