"Girl, 8, envisions seeing again"

Girl, 8, envisions seeing again
Eight-year-old Maria de los Angeles Suarez has a chance to see again —
thanks to a kind-hearted Silver Spring doctor and a radically new
surgical technique combining an eyeball harvested from a cadaver and
stem cells from her own mother.
at http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20040720-110102-9294r.htm

 

This sounds bizarre. It is hard for me to believe that any reputable
physician would undertake such surgery without previous animal studies. Were
there any?

Bill

 

It sounds bizarre, becaue it probably is an inaccurate description.

The procedure sounds like the tradition CORNEAL transplant (not the eyeball,
although the cornea does come from a donated eye). This surgery depends on
healthy peripheral host corneal epithelial cells to grow over the donated
cornea once the donor epithelium goes away. In the case of a severe
Stevens-Johnson syndrome (which is what the problem sounds like), the
corneal cells (including the stem cells at the limbus, from which new cells
grow) are gone. In order to get new epithelium going, you can transplant a
limbal section of cornea with stem cells from the fellow eye. In the absence
of viable cells in the other eye, the next best hope is compatible stem
cells, in this case from the mother. A small partial-thickness section of
limbal cornea is taken and sutured to the patient's eye.

Not a strange thing to do. I believe it is just that the newspaper article
distorted the facts.