TECHNOLOGICAL advances and techniques borrowed from bio-engineering have sparked innovations in corneal surgery, but many recent advances are essentially a recycling of existing theories with the benefit of better science, according to Sheraz Daya MD, East Grinstead, UK.
He notes that progress in areas such as limbal transplants are changing the prognosis of patients with stem cell deficiencies but he believes it would be a mistake to view this as entirely new.
Delivering the annual Choyce Medal Lecture at the UKISCRS Annual Meeting in Leeds, Dr Daya said corneal surgeons had described stem cells in action in the 1960s, even though it would be decades before scientists unraveled the underlying mechanisms.
“We’ve been pushing the boundaries with our work on stem cells but this is not a recent discovery. Conjunctival limbal autograft and allografts were discussed in the proceedings of the Royal Cornea Congress in 1964,” said Dr Daya, who has himself mined our surgical textbooks for inspiration.
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