A Standford research team has created a new potential way to fix damaged corneas- on of the major causes of vision problems and blindness. Millions of new eye cells are being grown in a Palo Alto lab, enlisting one of medicine’s most important and promising new tools: refurbishing diseased and damaged tissue with healthy new cells.
One of the exciting possibilities of this approach is the ability to create enough cells treat tens or hunderds of patients with one donor cornea.
About 100,000 corneal transplants are done annually around the world- but they require surgery with donated corneas from cadavers. The procedure fails nearly a 3rd of the time and there aren’t enough high-quality donor corneas to go around according to researchers.
Stanford’s innovative strategy, 8 years in the making is to grow individual cells instead. The team then harvests a few mother corneal cells called progenitor cells donated from a cadaver. These cells are then put into a warm broth in petri dishes where they give birth to many new young corneal cells.
The cells are being grown at Stanford’s new laboratory for cell and gene medicine, a 25,000 square foot biological manufacturing facility on Palo Alto’s California Avenue.
The Standford team enlisted a recent technological advance: magnetic nanoparticles. The particles are incredibly small, measuring only 50 nanometers in diameter. The new young cells were magnetized with the nanoparticles, loaded into a syringe and injected into the eye. Then, using an electromagnetic force on a patch held outside of the eye, the team pulled the cells into the middle of the eye, to the back of cornea. Later, the magnetic nanoparticles fell off the cells, exited the eye and were excreted in the patient’s urine.
Trials:
In the first trial of 11 patients, a so-called phase 1 trial, the team only studied safety. Not only was the procedure safe but were efficient too. Standford researchers plans to expand the study in September to Phase 2 to measure how the vision of the patients improves.
If the results are successful, the approach could also be used to replace other types of damaged eye cells offering therapies for retinal and optic nerve diseases including glaucoma, the leading cause of irreversible blindness.
The approach is part of an expanding field of lab grown cell therapies. Sheets of healthy skin are used to treat burns, chronic skin wounds and disease like epidermolysis bullosa which causes incurable blistering. Bioengineered cartilage is increasingly being used to treat certain knee injuries.
Researchers are hopeful that lab-grown corneal cells could become another important type of regenerative medicine. The new approach could offer a non-surgical permanent solution in many places.