Cornea transplants can give sight back to the blind, but they are notoriously tricky: Sutures can cause swelling. The body can reject the tissue. Each transplant requires a large mass of cells taken from a healthy eye.
Now a surgeon at Tokyo Women's Medical University has come up with a method being hailed as a possible solution for all those potential troubles.
Teruo Okano has developed a procedure allowing doctors to grow an entire cornea from a tiny speck of cells in a petri dish in an incubator, peel it off at room temperature, and place it directly on the eye -- without a single stitch.