Scientists at Mass Eye and Ear are winners of the 2025 Gizmodo Science Fair for their research and development of an experimental stem cell therapy for severely, and supposedly permanently, injured corneas.
The question
Can stem cells help repair previously untreatable eye injuries?
The results
In a small trial of 14 patients published this March, the researchers showed it was possible to take stem cells from a person’s healthy eye and use them to safely replenish the surface of their other severely damaged cornea.
18 months after the procedure, nearly all of the patients continued to show at least a partial response to the treatment and saw their vision improve, while two-thirds experienced a complete restoration of their corneal surface. No severe side effects related to the treatment were reported.
Why they did it
When our cornea—the transparent outer layer of the eye—is harmed by injury or infection, doctors often treat it by transplanting healthy corneal tissue from a donor, also known as a corneal graft. But sometimes, an injury is so damaging that it also wipes away the cornea’s limited supply of surface stem cells, also called limbal epithelial cells. Without these cells, people will experience symptoms like itching, pain, whitened corneas, and eventually loss of vision.
The team’s approach harvests corneal stem cells from the person’s healthy eye and grows them in the lab. These cultivated autologous limbal epithelial cells (CALEC) are then packaged onto a cellular tissue graft that’s transplanted to the other eye.
“Corneal stem cell deficiency is really one of the most common causes of blindness worldwide. These stem cells create a healthy corneal epithelial cell layer, and that is compatible with good vision and no pain and just having a comfortable eye when you blink,” project leader Ula Jurkunas, associate director of the Cornea Service at Mass Eye and Ear, told Gizmodo. “And therefore, we developed this kind of stem cell therapy in response to an unmet medical need for stem cell deficiency and corneal blindness.”
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