Five months after the operation, this man has not regained his sight, but his new eye shows encouraging signs of good health, according to surgeons.
American surgeons announced in a press release on Thursday, November 9, that they had performed the first transplant of a complete eye on a patient. If the latter has not regained his sight, five months after the operation, the experts are “amazed” “To see that this transplanted eye still shows signs of very good health, including blood flow to the retina,” said Eduardo Rodriguez, the surgeon who led the procedure at NYU Langone University Hospital in New York. Health.
“There are millions of people who have lost their sight, and we’re not saying we’re going to solve that today.”he declared in a press conference. “But we’re definitely a little bit closer.”
“We have a lot of hope”
During a 21-hour operation, the patient received, in addition to the left eye and its orbit, a transplant of the nose, lips and other facial tissues taken from a donor. Victim in 2021 of a workplace accident, during which his face touched a high-voltage electrical line, Aaron James appeared with his face completely uncovered during the press conference, his left eye closed under his eyelid, which he cannot yet move naturally.
“Whether I can see or not, it’s like this”, declared this former soldier, whose right eye functions normally. “You have to start somewhere, and I hope this will initiate something that we can improve for the next patient.”
The main difficulty of an eye transplant is to restore the transmission of information to the brain via the optic nerve, which is cut in both the patient and the donor to carry out the transplant. In the case of Aaron James, “a large part of the retina is preserved, and our tests show that it is capable of generating a signal”said Vaidehi Dedania, retina specialist at NYU Langone Health. “We will continue to follow it, and see how things evolve. But we have a lot of hope,” she said, when asked about the chances they would be able to see out of their left eye again. “In medicine, you never like to say never.”
Precedents in animals
“It’s a huge step forward”added surgeon Kia Washington, who has been working on this problem for 10 years at the University of Colorado. “So many people still doubted” that such a transplant “was possible in humans.”
Whole eye transplants had already been carried out on small animals, whose vision was at least partially restored in some cases. But achieving this in humans will require combining “lots of different methods”, she explained. Among those cited by the specialist as future avenues: gene therapy, the use of stem cells, or even the preparation of the recipient’s brain via electrical stimulation.
In Aaron James’ case, stem cells from the donor’s spinal cord were also injected into the patient’s optic nerve, in the hope of improving its regeneration.