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- The Moran Eye Center in Utah is part of a $125 million project aiming for eye transplants.
- The project seeks breakthroughs in nerve reconnection, transplantation and neuroscience, with a four-year goal.
- Eye transplants may aid late-stage glaucoma and traumatic injury patients, despite challenges.
SALT LAKE CITY — A Utah scientist at the Moran Eye Center is part of a project working to make eye transplants a reality.
The project was announced in early December by the U.S. Health Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health. The announcement said it committed up to $125 million for the project, which it is calling the Transplantation of Human Eye Allografts program.
The agency's director, Renee Wegryzn, said it "intends to revolutionize the reconnection of nerves to the brain and develop breakthroughs in transplantation, preservation and neuroscience."
Frans Vinberg studied biomedical engineering at Finland University. He happened to join a laboratory for his master's thesis that was studying retinas. From there he went to a summer conference and connected with research in the United States, eventually bringing him to Utah.
He said the research has already started. He now has a team of researchers available 24/7 so the lab is ready whenever donor eyes become available. After his team receives donor eyes, they conduct experiments, day and night, as long as the donor eyes are viable.
Vinberg said they have been doing a similar process over the past two years to study eyes but they are scaling it up, hoping to get at least two sets of donor eyes each month.
He said a retired ophthalmologist, Calvin Roberts, initiated the project. He decided, based on some recent advances, that a working eye transplant might be possible. These include the first successful eye and face transplant in New York; another was researchers at the Moran Eye Center working with Donor Connect to develop methods to begin research on eyes more quickly.
He said eye banks do important work for cornea transplants, but the cornea is less sensitive than the retina. For a hypothetical eye transplant, the eyes would need to be recovered much faster, which Donor Connect has been helping them with, recovering eyes shortly after other organs for transplants.
"If you really want to study functional human eye, where you have light responses in the retina, which is part of our brain, part of our central nervous system, then you need to do it differently than it's traditionally done," he said.
They provided a case for the Eye Bank technicians to transplant the eye with an oxygen tank, which was sufficient for the research they had been doing. Vinberg said they have plans to try to transplant eyes with the artery connecting it to the brain as the project continues.
Vinberg said his team had published their findings from working with Donor Connect in Nature, a science journal, which led Roberts to reach out to him and encourage him to work with them to try to solve eye transplants. He said this area of the project is led by Stanford and the University of Pittsburgh.
There are different research teams with separate goals — developing protocols for recovering donated eyes and keeping them responsive to light, doing aesthetic transplants, and restoring vision by connecting the donated eye to the brain.
Vinberg called it a "moonshot project." The hope is to restore vision in transplanted eyes, but he said even if the consortium does not succeed, it will make strides in other areas through the research.
He anticipates learning more about gene editing therapies through their tests on eyes. He said most animals do not have a macula so living human eyes are also important for researching macular degeneration.
The project has a four-year goal, which Vinberg said is "very ambitious."
Even once eye transplants are available, Vinberg said they will be rare, only used when both eyes are not working and in circumstances where there are no other treatments available.
"You don't want to do a transplant lightly ... because there is an immune response," he said.
He added there are multiple retinal diseases without treatments and that eye transplants could help patients with late-stage glaucoma or patients receiving face transplants due to traumatic injuries.
Vinberg said researchers know the retina can be kept alive because it still produces light responses, but whether those light responses can be passed to the brain is unclear.
He thanked donors and their families who are willing to let their eyes be used for science, saying without them the research would not be possible.
