Artificial Corneas Partial Sight Restoration in Blind Patients: Man Made Corneas – Man made corneas have been very successful in recent eye transplants, seeming to work just as well, if not better than transplants done using human donor corneas. What is hoped to be achieve, over time, is an end to the shortage of corneas available for transplant.
In the U.K. alone, over 3,000 transplants are done each year, but that number could have been much higher if there was more corneas available. Worldwide, there are 1.5 million who end up going blind from the lack of corneas available.
The man-made corneas will improve the quality of life for many, who go blind prematurely for various reasons.
In the past, the efforts and studies done to find a way to make man-made corneas have had limited success, and in the end North American and Swedish researchers were forced to find a way to grow synthetic human tissue to form a human collagen, which is to be shaped in to the shape of the cornea, which is a wafer-thin button-like shape.
The procedure to perform this transplant requires the scraping away of damaged tissue, and then replacing it with the man-made cornea. This procedure takes around half an hour to do, and the results so far have been positive, with patients being able to blink and cry, with the nerves that were severed mending themselves.