A 78-year-old legally blind Israeli man is said to have regained his sight after an artificial cornea transplant;
Haifa’s Jamal Furani was able to read text and recognize relatives after receiving the CorNeat Vision biomimetic implant during the operation less than an hour last month, the Times of Israel reported.
“Presenting that first implanted eye and being in this room was surreal,” the company’s co-founder, Dr. Gilad Litvin, told the newspaper.
“Attending another human being regained sight the next day was electrifying and emotionally exciting,” Litvin said. “There were a lot of tears in the room.”
The artificial cornea, made of a synthetic, non-degradable porous material, adapts to the eye wall to replace healed or deformed corneas.
Once implanted, the material integrates with living tissue by stimulating “cell proliferation” in the eye, thanks in part to large-scale chemical engineering, the company said.
Once the bandages were removed, Furani saw the light, the company said in a Jan. 11 statement.
“The surgical procedure was simple and the result exceeded all our expectations,” said Professor Irit Bahar, who performed the implant surgery.
Furani suffered from eye edema and other illnesses that made him legally blind for about a decade, the medium said.
Furani was one of ten patients approved for the experimental procedure at Rabin Medical Center, with two more places open in Canada this month.
Other sites in the United States, France, and the Netherlands are pending approval.