Abstract
Purpose :
Corneal endothelium is a single cell layer and plays a key role for maintaining corneal transparency. Human corneal endothelial cells possess little proliferative ability and the density of corneal endothelial cells is progressively decreased with aging. Once corneal endothelial decompensation, the patient will become blindness and the only way to rescue him/her is to do corneal transplantation; unfortunately, the corneas from eye banks are usually collected from an older donor with a low corneal endothelial density. This study to examine whether corneal endothelial cells of donor cornea can be promote to increase corneal endothelial cell density through processing donor cornea with ROCK-1 and some growth factors in vitro.
Methods :
Cornea was harvested from cats and respectively incubated in DMEM containing EGF, bFGF, EDTA etc. Afterwards, corneas were processed by ROCK-1, or IGF-1 for different time points and examined through immunostaining with antibodies of anti-ZO-1, anti-BrdU, etc.
Results :
Incubation of corneas in EDTA medium resulted in the breakup of corneal endothelial cell junctions, showed by cell border separation through ZO-1 immunostaining. BrdU staining revealed that numerous proliferating cells presented in corneal endothelial single layer.
Conclusions :
The growth factors can be used to promote the proliferation of endothelial cells of donor cornea before corneal transplantation
This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2017 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Baltimore, MD, May 7-11, 2017.