A Japanese woman in her forties has become the first person in the world to have her cornea repaired using reprogrammed stem cells.
At a press conference on 29 August, ophthalmologist Kohji Nishida from Osaka University, Japan, said the woman has a disease in which the stem cells that repair the cornea, a transparent layer that covers and protects the eye, are lost. The condition makes vision blurry and can lead to blindness.
To treat the woman, Nishida says his team created sheets of corneal cells from induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells.