Recently, the team of Professor Zhang Mingchang from the Department of Ophthalmology of Union Hospital Affiliated to Huazhong University of Science and Technology (referred to as "Wuhan Union Hospital") successfully completed China's first synthetic corneal transplant.
The patient recovered well after the operation, and the uncorrected visual acuity of the right eye recovered to 0.4, and he was discharged from the hospital on January 12.
Professor Cheng Yang, director of the Department of Ophthalmology, said that the artificial cornea used in this clinical trial is the only biosynthetic product in the world that has entered the late stage of clinical trials and can replace the donor cornea to treat corneal blindness.
Carrying out clinical trials of artificial corneas may alleviate the shortage of corneal donors to a certain extent.
He also reminded that artificial corneal transplantation has strict indications and is still in clinical research, and the long-term efficacy needs further observation.
Currently, this surgery can only be transplanted for corneal lesions that do not involve the full thickness. If it is a full-thickness corneal lesion, it is still necessary to use a donated cornea.
(Liu Kunwei, Xiong Wanting and Xie Huatao produced Zou Hao's video and sourced from Union Hospital Affiliated to Huazhong University of Science and Technology)
Responsible editor: [Wang Yu]