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Holland EJ. The Richard L. Lindstrom, MD Medal Presentation Lecture: A Corneal Odyssey – Challenges and Triumphs. Presented at: American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery meeting; July 23-27, 2021; Las Vegas.
Disclosures: Holland reports financial ties with Aurion Biotech.
LAS VEGAS – Instead of using a donor cornea for one patient, endothelial cell therapy can allow donor tissue to be used by up to 100 patients, study finds.
Edward J. Holland, MD, presented the results of the IOTA trial at Richard L. Lindstrom, MD, Medal Lecture at the American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery meeting. The IOTA trial included the first successful injectable corneal endothelial cell therapy (Aurion Biotech) procedures performed outside of Japan, where it was first developed by Shigeru Kinoshita, MD, PhD, and colleagues at the University. of Kyoto Prefecture Medicine.
The procedure would help treat more patients with fewer corneas and help expand corneal transplants to more parts of the world, especially in developing countries, Holland said.
Edward J. Holland
“One cornea can supply endothelium to hundreds of patients,” he said. “We have 12 million people worldwide who are blind from corneal disease and around 7 million are from endothelium. We don’t have 7 million corneas, but we could probably find 40,000 to 60,000 and get cells from those patients.
The study included 50 patients diagnosed with corneal endothelial disease who were treated with the cell therapy procedure and was divided into two parts. In IOTA-Part 1, researchers were able to treat 16 patients with a single donor. In IOTA-Part 2, they treated 34 patients with a single donor.
Holland said the first patient treated went from better corrected visual acuity of 20/500 to 20/40 6 months after the procedure, while the central corneal thickness was reduced from 800 µm to 502 µm. Another patient experienced improvements in acuity and corneal thickness from 20/2000 to 20/30 and from 891 µm to 557 µm, respectively.
The researchers will also evaluate the patients for 12 months to monitor the safety and effectiveness of the treatment.
Holland said they are planning further clinical trials in the United States to move to approval.
“It has the potential to be the treatment of choice for all endothelial diseases,” he said. “What really turns us on is this potential to be the solution to global corneal blindness, which we don’t have.”
Meeting of the American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery
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