Blind for nine years, Sharron “Kay” Thornton has just regained her sight through a first-in-the-U.S. surgical procedure at Bascom Palmer Eye Institute at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. The procedure -- modified osteo-odonto-keratoprosthesis (MOOKP) -- implanted her eyetooth in her eye, as a base to hold a prosthetic lens. [More]

Certain eye conditions appear to put patients at greater risk for having a failed cornea transplant, according the Cornea Donor Study (CDS), a multi-center clinical trial conducted by the National Eye Institute. The study concludes that patients with glaucoma and patients who had corneal swelling following an earlier cataract surgery were more likely to experience failure of the cornea transplant than were other patients in the study. [More]

Eye surgeons will soon have a new surgical tool to help make a complicated eye surgery less labor intensive while providing significant advantages for corneal transplant patients, as a result of an invention by a Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center physician. [More]

In a world-first breakthrough by Australian scientists, the eyesight in a damaged eye has been restored by using stem cells from the eye itself [More]

In a world-first breakthrough, University of New South Wales (UNSW) medical researchers have used stem cells cultured on a simple contact lens to restore sight to sufferers of blinding corneal disease. [More]

For infants and children with blinding diseases of the cornea, a sophisticated new corneal transplantation technique offers the hope of improving vision while overcoming the technical difficulty and low success rate of traditional penetrating keratoplasty (PK) in children, according to reports in the current issue of the Journal of AAPOS (American Association for Pediatric Ophthalmology and Strabismus). [More]

The age pool of corneas for transplant should be expanded to include donors up to 75 years of age, based on findings from a study funded by the National Eye Institute (NEI), one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). [More]

Scientists have completed a study using mice which showed that bone marrow stem cells can switch roles and produce keratocan, a natural protein involved in the growth of the cornea, the transparent, outer layer of the eyeball. [More]