For patients with severe corneal injuries, blindness has often been seen as a life sentence. But a new eye stem cell transplant may change that. Scientists at Massachusetts Eye and Ear have successfully used stem cells from a patient’s own healthy eye to restore vision in cases once thought beyond repair.
The cornea—the clear outer layer of the eye—is crucial for focusing light and protecting against damage. It contains important limbal epithelial stem cells, which help repair minor injuries. However, in cases of thermal or chemical burns, the damage can be so severe that these natural repair mechanisms fail, leaving patients permanently blind in the affected eye.
A new procedure called cultivated autologous limbal epithelial cells (CALEC) could help heal that damage, though. Essentially, doctors harvest stem cells from a patient’s healthy eye, grow them in a lab over several weeks, and then transplant them into the damaged eye. Once in place, these stem cells help regenerate the cornea, restoring its function.
A clinical trial tested this new stem cell transplant on 14 patients, tracking their progress over 18 months. 50 percent of patients had fully restored corneas within three months, while that number rose to 79 percent by 12 months. Including partial successes, the eye stem cell transplant saw an overall success rate of 92 percent.
The researchers involved say that many patients regained sight, with some moving from legally blind to low vision. While some required a second transplant, the procedure was well tolerated, and none of the patients experienced any major side effects in either the donor’s or recipient’s eyes.
For decades, severe corneal injuries have been considered untreatable beyond prosthetics or partial transplants. Traditional cornea transplants often fail in these cases because the underlying stem cell damage prevents proper healing. But with the eye stem cell transplant, researchers may have found a way around this limitation.
Repairing the cornea at the cellular level reopens the door to vision restoration for thousands of patients worldwide. And with further trials planned, not to mention FDA approval on the horizon, CALEC could soon become a standard treatment—giving hope to those once told their blindness was irreversible.
The possibilities of this treatment are expanded even further when you consider that researchers have even found a way to grow stem cells in the lab.
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