Artificial Cornea Implant Helps Legally-Blind Man Regain His Sight
Allowing him to read text and recognize family members.
A legally blind man has just regained his sight. 78-year-old Jamal Furani from Haifa is now able to see again thanks to the implant of an artificial cornea developed by CorNeat Vision, and it’s the first successful implant of such kind.
The implant is called KPro and it integrates directly onto the eyewall to replace scarred or deformed corneas. It’s made out of 100 percent non-degradable porous material and requires no donor tissue. Through nanoscale chemical engineering, the KPro is able to mimic existing cell environments, “stimulat[ing] cellular proliferation” to facilitate “progressive tissue integration.” Synthetic cornea implant surgeries have already existed, but they’re often considered a last resort due to the surgery’s complexity. CorNeat’s implant, however, is a major solution, since the procedure is a lot more simple and requires less surgery.
After the operation, Furani was able to read text and recognize family members. “After years of hard work, seeing a colleague implant the CorNeat KPro with ease and witnessing a fellow human being regain his sight the following day was electrifying and emotionally moving, there were a lot of tears in the room,” said Dr. Gilad Litvin, co-founder of CorNeat. There are at least 10 more patients in line for CorNeat’s trial in Israel, alongside a few others in Canada, U.S., France and Netherlands.
In other news, Microsoft has joined Oracle and Salesforce to develop digital COVID-19 vaccination cards.
