OC Business Journal

A Breakthrough Discovery

—Audrey Kemp

According to Dr. Edward Holland, a corneal transplant is considered the most successful organ transplant procedure in the human body—except for patients with an ocular surface disease.

“No matter what we did for those patients, their transplants would fail,” he said. “We didn’t understand the pattern of rejection.”

Holland and his team of 10 scientists set out to discover why. They found that those patients lacked limbal stem cells, which are located at the junction between the white part of the eye and the cornea, causing the eye to reject the donor tissue.

Thus, they went “all in on immunosuppression,” Holland said, and devised a new procedure, where they’d take stem cells from another eye and transplant them to the patient’s eye. Three months later, they would perform the corneal transplant.

He completed his first successful procedure in 1989.

Soon thereafter, the so-called “Cincinnati Protocol” boasted the highest success rate among programs in the country—about 75%—a great improvement from what they had before, which was “zero chance of vision,” he said.

TECHNOLOGY

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2022-05-23T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-05-23T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://ocbusinessjournal.pressreader.com/article/281921661657194

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