artificial cornea transplant

[space_cadet]

I just caught the end of the news and something about the first artifical cornea transplant has been done on a 91 year old gentleman n was successful, and the surgeon is hoping these will be mainstream within a decade, but what does this mean for all of us with KC?

[Grant]

BBC News article on this https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cv223pj2p8po

[Anne Klepacz]

Before everyone gets too excited, this is 'the wrong type of transplant' for most people with KC! It's replacing the back layer of the cornea, the endothelium, which is what fails in another corneal condition, Fuchs Dystrophy, or can fail after a conventional graft.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/art ... -nhs-first
https://www.escrs.org/eurotimes-article ... al-oedema/ So it isn't an alternative to the graft most people with KC now have, the partial DALK graft, which is replacing all the other layers of the cornea, leaving the patient's endothelium in place.
And while it may be the first transplant of this type in the UK, it isn't the first artificial cornea transplant in the UK. There's another procedure called a Boston K-Pro which IS used for KC if someone has had multiple graft failures. That's been around for a few years now.
But this whole area is developing rapidly with some researchers working on bio-engineering corneal tissue, so who knows where we'll be in 5 or 10 years time.
And, of course, far fewer people with KC now need a transplant, because with corneal crosslinking, their KC never progresses to that point.

[PhilLer]

It think that using such artificial cornea could be useful in the case of failed corneal graft as well as using improved artificial endothelium