Corneas made from pig collagen have restored sight for people who were previously blind or visually impaired. “We got much better results than we expected,” says Mehrdad Rafat, one of the team
at Linköping University in Sweden and his colleagues manufactured a flexible yet resilient dome that resembles a contact lens by extracting and purifying collagen from porcine skin. Following successful trials, the team began testing the artificial corneas in human volunteers.All 20 people in the trial had corneal blindness due to keratoconus, a condition in which the cornea thins and bulges outward from the centre of the eye.
“I remember the first time that the first implant was implanted in one of the patients,” says Rafat. “I couldn’t sleep. I was awake all night, just waiting for the surgeon to let me know, how did the surgery go?” When sight was restored, “it was amazing”, he says. “We got much better results than we expected.”
Because collagen is a structured protein that lacks individual cells, a recipient’s immune system shouldn’t reject the porcine cornea. People with donor corneas usually need to take medication for several years to avoid rejection, while the people in the study used immunosuppressive eye drops for eight weeks.
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