Abstract
Presentation Description :
Corneal blindness is a major cause of blindness worldwide. Transplantation with human donor corneas is the only widespread treatment but according to the World Health Organization (WHO), about 90% of visually impaired people live in developing countries where transplantation is not affordable and there is a severe shortage of donated tissues. We have developed an alternative option of ‘re-growing’ the patient’s own cornea with the help of biosynthetic implants made from recombinant human collagen, and have tested these in 10 patients. We recently reinforced the implants with a synthetic lipid polymer, 2-methacryloyloxyethyl phosphorylcholine (MPC) to stabilize then and also modulate the inflammation. These new hybrid implants have now been tested on high risk patients in the Ukraine, who all had painful, ulcerated cornea surfaces, and for whom conventional donor cornea transplantation carried a high risk of rejection. In these patients, the implants were able to retore corneal surface integrity and alleviate the pain. Newer implants that comprise self-assembling peptide analogs of collagen and implants that incorporate silver nanoparticles with anti-bacterial properties, or that incorporate nanoparticles delivering anti-viral peptides have been developed and will be discussed.
This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2016 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Seattle, Wash., May 1-5, 2016.