Technically Speaking

Scientist have successfully grown human corneas in the eyes of partially blind animals. This breakthrough may pave the way to a viable source of replacement corneas for millions of people.

Humans are currently the only source of corneas for transplantation, and the supply of donor tissue is limited.

In addition, the artificial corneas may actually work better than human versions - growing their own nerve connections within the eye.

This helps the cornea maintain itself properly, as a loss of sensitivity can lead to ulceration and injury.

The artificial cornea is grown around a “scaffold” of plastic and protein implanted into the eye.

It regenerates the cells necessary to make a fully functioning cornea within a matter of weeks.

This scaffold technique has been successfully performed only on pigs. Scientist are excited because the technique can be a basis for further study in the areas of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. Hopefully it will lead to some solutions to regenerating nerves.

They wrote, in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: “Other corneal substitutes have been produced and tested, but we report an implantable matrix that performs as a physiologically functional tissue substitute and not simply as a prosthetic device.

“These replacements should have applicability to many areas of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, especially where nerve function is required.”

Mr Bruce Allan, an consultant ophthalmologist at Moorfields Eye Hospital, told BBC News Online that an artificial cornea needed to have a nerve supply to work properly.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 9th, 2003 at 9:06 am and is filed under Medicine/Genetics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.