Regenerative medicine for the cornea provides a novel treatment strategy for patients with corneal diseases instead of conventional keratoplasty. Limbal transplantation has been performed in patients with a limbal stem cell deficiency. This procedure requires long-term immunosuppression that involves high risks of serious eye and systemic complications, including infection, glaucoma, and liver ...

The cornea requires constant epithelial renewal to maintain clarity for appropriate vision. A subset of stem cells residing at the limbus is primarily responsible for maintaining corneal epithelium homeostasis. Trauma and disease may lead to stem cell deficiency and therapeutic targeting to replenish the stemness capacity has been stalled by the lack of reliable corneal epithelial stem cell mar...

Epithelial and stromal stem cells are required to maintain corneal transparency. The aim of the study was to develop a new method to isolate and grow both corneal stromal (SSC) and epithelial limbal (LSC) stem cells from small human limbal biopsies under culture conditions in accordance with safety requirements mandatory for clinical use in humans. Superficial limbal explants were retrieved fro...

Purpose: To report the early results of transplantation of autologous limbal stem cells cultivated on amniotic membrane (AM) in patients with total unilateral limbal stem cell deficiency (LSCD). Methods: Four eyes of 4 patients with total unilateral LSCD confirmed with impression cytology underwent transplantation of autologous limbal stem cell cultivated on AM. At each follow up visit, a compl...

The human ocular surface (front surface of the eye) is formed by two different types of epithelia: the corneal epithelium centrally and the conjunctival epithelium that surrounds this. These two epithelia are maintained by different stem cell populations (limbal stem cells for the corneal epithelium and the conjunctival epithelial stem cells). In this review, we provide an update on our underst...

1. Function and structure of the cornea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2. Corneal development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 3. The stroma and endothelium . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...

OBJECTIVE To assess the potential role of matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) in the pathogenesis of pterygia by comparing the immunolocalization patterns of MMPs in altered limbal basal stem cells, activated fibroblasts, and areas of elastotic degeneration adjacent to the pterygia. METHODS Nine primary and 1 recurrent pterygia along with normal superior limbal-conjunctival tissue and cornea wer...

A simple, reproducible, animal-material free method for cultivating and characterizing cornea limbal epithelial stem cells (LESCs) on human lens capsule (LC) was developed for future clinical transplantation. The limbal tissue explants (2 × 2 × 0.25 mm) were harvested from 77 cadavers and expanded ex vivo on either cell culture plates or LC in medium containing human serum as the only growth su...

PURPOSE To investigate methods of isolating putative corneal epithelial stem cells from cultured limbal tissue. METHODS Three extraction techniques were compared to identify an efficient method of obtaining a large number of viable corneal epithelial stem cells from the limbus. Limbal tissues were extracted by incubation at 37 degrees C or 4 degrees C for 1 or 16 hours, respectively, with 1.2...