..."But currently this technology has encountered a bottleneck, and there has been no breakthrough. The two most important problems are the rejection reaction of the eyeball tissue to this artificial material.
To put it simply, it is the body's rejection reaction to foreign matter. This is actually a protective mechanism of the human body to prevent the erosion of foreign matter and is a type of immune system. However, problems have been encountered in transplant operations. Whether it is artificial materials or allogeneic tissue transplants, there will be this cheap reaction. At present, the rejection of allogeneic tissue transplantation can be controlled by drugs, but there is currently no good solution to the rejection of artificial materials.
And when the human body develops an immune response to the allogeneic cornea, it may cause local tissue damage, inflammation, scarring and other problems, seriously affecting eye health and vision. This is also the main problem that prevents this kind of artificial cornea from being transplanted into the eyeball.
Secondly, it was found that it can cause water leakage in the transplanted eye, and the transplanted artificial cornea can fall off, so it cannot be widely used at present.
As for biological cornea, it mainly uses biological materials. The characteristics of this material are that there is no rejection reaction or relatively small rejection reaction, and it has significant curative effect. It can basically help patients with corneal damage or corneal loss to restore better vision. .
However, the current biological cornea technology is not mature enough to develop a very mature biological cornea sample, let alone conduct clinical trials. In addition, scientists have also discovered that the cornea made of this biological material will degenerate and shrink after being implanted on the surface of the eyeball for a long time, and the atrophy will also cause wrinkles and texture inside the biological cornea, which is serious. Affect vision.
Therefore, this has also kept biocorneal technology limited to the laboratory, and there has been no breakthrough for a long time. Although many scientific research institutions, pharmaceutical companies, and biological laboratories have claimed that they have conquered biological cornea technology in recent years, in the end there seems to be no progress. "
What Wu Hao said was true, not exaggerated at all.
In fact, before Wu Hao's bio-3D printer technology was released, bio-cornea technology was also regarded as the most easily conquered technology in the biomedical field, or the organ tissue that is most easily replaced by artificial organs.
However, after so many years, progress has been very slow. This has also led to the fact that this technology, which originally had high hopes, has not been able to meet the public, let alone be used in patient treatment.
And when Wu Hao mentioned this at the press conference, he was obviously prepared. This has also made many people look forward to it. Although this patient population is relatively small, there are only more than 3 million in China, and only 60 to 60 million globally.
However, because this technology is of great significance and the added value of technical products is relatively high, the expected revenue is still very considerable.
In addition to economic benefits, this technology has also brought huge influence in the fields of biomedical technology and social and humanistic care.
On the stage, Wu Hao said with a smile: "I believe everyone has guessed it by now. Yes, the New Year gift we are going to bring you next is related to this cornea. This is the artificial biological cornea."
“Since the successful development of our bio-3D printing technology, we have been trying to use it to print more human organs and tissues, so as to save patients suffering from diseases caused by various organ tissues.
Bio-3D printed cornea is also part of our research and is one of many sub-projects.
Although this corneal tissue is very small, it should be considered one of the smaller organs and tissues we print. It looks like it should be very easy to print, but in fact it is very difficult, even very difficult. "
After speaking, Wu Hao glanced at the audience, and then said with a helpless expression: "First of all, the biggest problem we face is the problem of raw materials for bio-3D printing of corneas. Without raw materials, we cannot print.
In the past, the raw materials we needed were basically obtained from the cells in the patient's body, cloned, cultured and divided, and then the cells cultured from these clones were used for printing.
The biggest advantage of this is that the printed organs and tissues can be perfectly implanted into the patient's body without rejection. Because these cells are cloned and cultured from cells in the patient's body, they are allogeneic transplants with a high success rate and the function of the transplanted organ is relatively well maintained.
However, when printing this kind of biological cornea, we encountered problems. The first is the access to these cells in the cornea, which is a problem. Because the cornea is transparent under normal circumstances and this type of cells is quite special, we need to extract the corneal cells from the cornea of the patient's eyes for clonal culture.
And this raises a problem. Most of the patients who need corneal transplantation due to corneal disease and blindness have incomplete corneas or no longer exist. So how do we obtain these cells for clonal cultivation?
It is possible to obtain these cells from other people, but the printed biological cornea will cause rejection when used on patients. This is the disadvantage of allogeneic transplantation. Long-term or even lifelong medication is required for anti-rejection treatment.
And this method of extracting healthy cell tissue from the cornea of other people's eyes is also very difficult, because the cornea is relatively fragile, the relative risk of extraction is relatively high, and it is difficult to find volunteers in this area.
So, we are back to the original question, how to obtain corneal cells. We discussed many methods, and finally decided to extract cells from patients.
A variety of extraction and cultivation technologies have been developed for this purpose. The first is direct extraction. This method is only targeted at those patients with corneal diseases and corneal problems, or for those patients who are not completely missing or damaged.
Their extraction method is very simple. They only need to extract active cells from the cornea of the eye. The method is very simple and safe.
For those patients whose cornea is completely missing or completely damaged, we also use another method, which is to extract corresponding cells from other tissue structures of the eye, and then screen and cultivate clones.
This method is more complicated, has certain risks, and is relatively expensive, but it solves the problem of corneal cell extraction and corneal printing and cloning for such patients.
From this aspect, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. After all, we are doing it on the basis of this disease, so the risks are controllable. Compared with restoring the eyesight, we think this risk is still bearable. After all, any operation and treatment will have risks, but the differences are It’s just a matter of risk. "
(End of chapter)
