'This opens up the procedure to many centers and rural areas that do not have eye banks.'
details how researchers in India and Iran created cell-free synthetic corneas out of "medical-grade purified freeze-dried type I porcine dermal atelocollagen" — also known as frozen pig skin collagen — and implanted them onto the eyes of 20 people who suffered from visual impairment.
Remarkably, after 24 months in which "no adverse event was observed" in any patient, all 20 patients experienced restored vision and a restored ability to wear contact lenses., study lead and experimental ophthalmologist at Sweden's Linköping University Neil Lagali described the implantation process he and his colleagues used in the research.
The research was accompanied by testing by independent labs to make sure the implants themselves were sterile, and those same tests found that the synthetic pig collagen corneas were much more shelf stable than human donor tissues, which only have a shelf life of a week or two as compared to the minimum two-year shelf life of the experimental implants.