According to a recent report by the Physicist Organization, a team of surgeons in New York, USA, completed the world's first whole-eye transplant. Although it is not yet known whether the patient's new eyes can see the world clearly, this medical breakthrough is a huge blessing for those with eye injuries.
On May 27 this year, the Eduardo Rodriguez team at NYU Langone Health performed an eye transplant and a partial facial transplant on Aaron James, a 46-year-old power line worker from Arkansas. More than five months later, his new eyeballs were back to health. During the operation, Rodriguez's team transplanted part of the deceased donor's face and entire left eye to Aaron. The entire operation lasted about 21 hours.
Aaron received a 7,200-volt electric shock in June 2021, causing injuries to his left eye, left arm above the elbow, nose and lips, front teeth, left cheek and chin. Aaron has had multiple face transplants so far, but none of them were eye repairs. Due to the complexity of the eye organ, whole-eye transplantation has always been a difficult problem in the medical community. Although researchers have been able to restore partial vision in animals, such transplants have never been performed in living humans.
Rodriguez explained that the first challenge in whole-eye transplantation is extracting the intricate network of blood vessels surrounding the eyeball. Unlike other facial features, the eyes receive blood from an area of the brain directly behind the eyeball. Therefore, surgeons must remove part of the donor's skull to gain access to these blood vessels. To avoid removing part of Aaron's skull, doctors connected his blood vessels to others in the donor's face, bypassing the brain and re-establishing blood flow to the eyes.
In addition, doctors had never before successfully reconnected a severed optic nerve (the nerve fibers that carry messages from the eye to the brain). To do this, Rodriguez's team preserved as much of the length of the donor optic nerve as possible to maximize the chance of the nerve fibers regenerating and connecting with Aaron's brain. They also used stem cells developed from the donor's bone marrow and injected them into the site where the donor's optic nerve and Aaron's optic nerve met to further stimulate nerve growth.
Vaideshi Didanya, an ophthalmologist at New York University, said that Aaron's transplanted left eye looks very healthy, with sufficient blood flow and internal fluid pressure to produce tears and electrical signals. Some nerve cells critical to vision are also active. Although Aaron cannot see the outside world yet, they are full of hope.