Italian doctors have carried out the world’s first successful macula transplant, restoring sight to a 67-year-old woman who had been blind for five years, Turin’s Molinette Hospital said on Monday.
The macula, also known as the yellow spot, is the central part of the retina at the back of the eye and contains most of the cone cells responsible for detailed vision.
The patient, Elena, lost her sight after a serious road accident. Her left optic nerve was damaged, preventing light signals from being transmitted from the eye to the brain, although the eye itself remained structurally intact.
Her right eye, however, suffered injuries so severe that both the retina and the transparency of the cornea were irreparably damaged, the hospital said in a statement. A standard cornea transplant was not possible because the part of the eye containing stem cells had also been damaged.
Despite this, Dr Michele Reibaldi and his team found a way forward by using healthy tissue from the left eye, which could no longer perform its function.
The surgeons removed the cornea, sclera, conjunctiva and, for the first time anywhere in the world, the macula from the left eye and transplanted them into the right eye.
The hospital described the procedure as a “biological transplant” that allowed doctors to reconstruct one functioning eye from two damaged ones.
Reibaldi said it remained to be seen how fully the transplanted retina would function, but that the initial results were encouraging. The operation, a highly complex procedure, lasted nearly six hours.
