Cornea made from pig collagen gives people who were blind 20/20 vision

Corryn Wetzel is a writer.

People who were previously legally blind or visually impaired can now see with the help of corneas. The recipients of the operations have not reported any serious side effects two years later.

More than 12 million people around the world have some form of eye disease or damage. Only 1 out of 70 people in need of care get a transplant because it requires a human donor. The cost of the operation makes it difficult for people in lower income countries to get treatment.

A group of people at Linkping University in Sweden have created a dome that resembles a contact lens. The artificial corneas were tested in human volunteers.

The 20 people in the trial had a condition called keratoconus, in which the cornea thins and bulges outward from the center of the eye, making them blind. Before the operation, 14 were legally blind. Everyone had better vision afterwards. After the procedure, three of the formerly blind participants were able to see clearly.

One of the first implants was in one of the patients. I had trouble sleeping. I was waiting for the surgeon to tell me how the surgery went. It was amazing when sight was restored. We got a lot better results than we anticipated.

The recipient's immune system shouldn't reject the porcine cornea because of the lack of individual cells. People with donor corneas usually need to take medication for several years to avoid rejection, while the people in the study used eyedrops for eight weeks.

The new eye may not be as revolutionary as first thought. She says that those with keratoconus can often be fitted with custom contact lenses. It won't cure anyone that can't be cured with the current technology.

He doesn't know what the final cost of the procedure will be, but he thinks it will be cheaper than a donor transplant. There are more clinical trials that need to be done before the porcine cornea can be more widely used.

Nature Biotechnology was published in the journal.