www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1589642,00.html
The Times and The Sunday Times electronic paper The Times and The Sunday Times electronic paper Britain April 29, 2005 Pioneering stem-cell surgery restores sight By Sam Lister, Health Correspondent A PIONEERING form of surgery has been developed that can restore the sigh t of patients by using stem cells to encourage damaged eyes to repair th emselves. A team of British specialists has successfully treated more than a dozen patients with impaired corneas by transplanting human stem cells grown i n a laboratory on to their eyes. Recent operations on ten patients showed that the technique restored sigh t in seven cases of people who had been blinded after getting acid, alka li and boiling metal in their eyes, or because of congenital disorders. Many of the patients treated at the Centre for Sight, Queen Victoria Hosp ital, in East Grinstead, West Sussex, had been told that they had no hop e of getting their sight back, or had already undergone failed corneal t ransplants. The process involves taking stem cells, which occur naturally in the eye, and developing them into sheets of cells in the laboratory. These are t ransplanted on to the surface of the eye where they are held in place by an amniotic membrane, which dissolves away as the sheet fuses to the ey e Sheraz Daya, an ophthalmic surgeon leading the Sussex team, which has spe nt five years perfecting the technique, said that doctors had been aston ished at how the cells appeared to trigger the eyes natural regeneratio n of its damaged surface. Tests on the patients after a year revealed no trace of the DNA of the stem-cell donor, meaning that the repair was ca rried out by the eyes own cells a permanent healing process that does not require long-term use of powerful drugs to suppress the patients i mmune system. Mr Daya said: The technique not only works, but there was no donor tissu e there. The cells appeared to have been shed from the eye and replaced by the patients own, much more hard y, cells. The team, including scientists at the hospitals McIndoe Surgical Centre, now hopes to identify the processes at work, which might then be used t o trigger the repair of other damaged tissue around the body. Details of the trial were revealed this month at an international conference of ey e specialists in America. All the patients in the trial had corneas that had become damaged because they no longer had limbal stem cells, which are normally under the eyelid and help to keep the surface of the cornea clear, protecting it. Edward Bailey, who lost his sight after caustic acid landed in his left e ye while he was cleaning pipes at a yoghurt factory, said that the opera tion had transformed his life. For ten years all I had seen was shades of black and grey, then after I had the operation the nurse came by and I saw a flash of blue fr om her uniform. I went home and when I took the patch off my eye, I had my vision back. It is only when you lose something like sight that you r ealise how precious it is. Nadey Hakim, a consultant surgeon at St Marys Hospital, London, said tha t it was likely that such action could be mimicked in other organs, thus reducing the need for organ transplants. Professor Hakim said: The hop e is that stem cells will one day be used to generate large quantities o f cells and tissues and possibly entire organs damaged by disease and in jury.
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