Healing, too

But even for those patients whose sight didn't improve, there was perhaps a more important change: pain relief.


"They're all burn patients," says Dr. Ahmad. "What they get is not only blinding, it's painful. Every time they blink, they get irritation to the eye."

Dr. Ahmad says that all of the patients had less pain after the study was over. "For some, improvement in their pain is enough for them to consider it successful," he says.

Real breakthrough

Although restoring sight seems revolutionary enough, the real advance of the project, according to Dr. Ahmad, is that the stem-cell therapy didn't use products derived from animals, something that had previously happened in similar earlier studies such as one done at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London last year.

"This is the first technique to grow the cells that is animal-free, no animal cells or products," says Dr. Ahmad.

"One of the main hurdles in getting stem cells to clinic is you have to overcome the requirements of using animal cells or products which might result in the transmission of pathogens of one species to another. This eliminates that sort of risk," he says.

Next steps

The UK's Medical Research Council has just funded the project to study 25 more patients for the next three years.

But the real challenge could be making the therapy available to more than just the next batch of patients. Creating the corneal cells requires advanced techniques and high-tech laboratories, which are not widely available, and the stem cells, after growing on the amniotic membrane, won't survive travel. To lengthen their shelf-life, Dr. Ahmad hopes to work on a way to freeze the cells so they can be shipped across Europe, or even to developing countries, where they can be thawed and used to restore sight.

"That would be the longer-term plan for how we'll make this much more accessible for other places," he says.


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