US doctors perform world’s first eye transplant…can it restore vision?

In a groundbreaking medical procedure, American doctors have performed an eyeball transplant on a patient who had his eyeball removed, as opposed to a corneal transplant. As the vitreous humor is currently being maintained sufficiently, there is growing interest in whether the patient’s vision could be restored in the future.

According to Reuters on the 10th (local time), a medical team at New York University (NYU) Langone Health announced the day before that they had performed the world’s first eyeball transplant on American male Aaron James (46) last May.

James, who underwent the surgery, was severely injured in June two years ago when he was hit by a high-voltage transmission line while working at a power line company. He suffered extensive injuries to his nose and mouth, lost his left arm, and his left eye was so badly damaged that his eyeball had to be removed.

They decided to perform a ‘double transplant’ that would reconstruct the face and transplant the eyeball, and put James on the transplant waiting list.

Although he decided to have the surgery for cosmetic purposes, James had no high hopes for the transplant surgery. Even the medical team attempting the first eyeball transplant warned him before the surgery that it might have “no effect at all”.

Three months after his name was put on the waiting list, a male donor in his 30s appeared. After undergoing a major surgery that lasted a total of 21 hours, James got a new eye with a brown iris.

Typically, to restore vision, the transparent tissue at the front of the eye, the cornea, is transplanted. The method of transplanting the entire eye, including the eyeball and optic nerve, has only been seen in movies, and this is the first time it has been implemented in reality.

Some experts have expressed skeptical views that the transplanted eyeball might shrivel up like a raisin if the vitreous humor is not secreted.

Fortunately, James’s left eye is maintaining a sufficient amount of vitreous humor, and the blood flow is good, and the retina is healthy without any rejection reaction.

It is still unknown whether vision can be restored through an eyeball transplant. This is because the optic nerve has not yet recovered enough to send signals to the brain.

However, the surgical team injected adult stem cells harvested from the donor’s bone marrow at the time of connecting the donated optic nerve with James’s optic nerve to stimulate nerve recovery.

Through this, they explained that they had laid the groundwork for vision recovery, even if the vision does not recover.

Indeed, despite the fact that James’s optic nerve has not healed, a series of tests have confirmed that brain signals are detected when light is shone on the eye, and there are enough special cells in the retina that can perform the task of converting light into electrical signals, which is one step in the creation of vision.

Dr. Eduardo Rodriguez, who led the research team, said, “We have accomplished something that has been dreamed of for centuries but has never been done before,” adding, “I can’t guarantee that he will be able to see the world with his left eye again. But for the same reason, I can’t assert that he won’t be able to see either.”

The research team plans to collaborate with various scientists to restore vision. For example, one research team is developing a method to connect the brain’s neural network to the eye without vision through electrode insertion.