A new study shows a promising procedure to treat severe injuries in one eye by using stem cells from the other.
Phil Durst recalled clawing at his face after a chemical from a commercial dishwashing machine squirted into his eyes, causing “the most indescribable pain I’ve ever felt — ever, ever, ever.”
“I went from completely blind with debilitating headaches and pondering if I could go another day — like really thinking I can’t do this anymore” to seeing well enough to drive and emerging from dark places literally and figuratively, he said, choking up. The procedure is designed to treat “limbal stem cell deficiency,” a corneal disorder that can occur after chemical burns and other eye injuries. Patients without limbal cells, which are essential for replenishing and maintaining the cornea’s outermost layer, can’t undergo corneal transplants that are commonly used to improve vision.
“The great part of it is that we’re using a patient’s own tissue,” not donor tissue the body might reject, Jurkunas said. Jurkunas, who is also affiliated with Harvard Medical School, said Durst’s 2018 surgery was the culmination of almost two decades of research, “so we felt immense happiness and excitement to finally do it.”
Jurkunas estimates about 1,000 people in the U.S. per year could potentially benefit from this sort of stem cell transplant, which“There’s definitely an unmet clinical need for this effort — there’s no question,” said Dr. Tueng Shen, an ophthalmology professor at the University of Washington who was not involved in the research. She added that doctors currently have no reliable source of cultivated limbal stem cells.
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