Twenty blind and partially sighted people have had a cornea like this implanted and can now see again. It is an artificial cornea, made from collagen molecules derived from pig skin.
An estimated 12.7 million people worldwide are blind due to a disease or damage to their cornea, the outer transparent layer of the eye. Until now, the only way to get them seen again was a human cornea transplant. But only one in 70 patients actually receive such a transplant, partly because a large number of them live in countries with limited access to health care and donated corneas.
The subjects all had keratoconus, a progressive disease in which the cornea thins and deforms. Fourteen of them were blind. After two years, none of them were blind, and three patients who were blind before the study had perfect vision again after surgery, researchers from Linköping University and biotech company LinkCare Life Sciences write in Nature Biotechnology.
Efforts have been made to keep the material and procedure cheap, the researchers write. For example, the pig skins from which the collagen comes are a by-product of the food industry, and they have found a minimally invasive method to insert the artificial cornea into the keratoconus patients.
Other benefits: This cornea can be stored for two years, significantly longer than the two-week shelf life of a donated human cornea, and only requires eight weeks of dripping with immunosuppressive drugs instead of several years with conventional corneal transplants.