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. http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/singapore/story/0,4386,169122,00.html?

Docs grew eye 'patch' - from her own eye
Black mole covering cornea of girl's eye is removed using stem-cell transplant pioneered by S'pore team

By Salma Khalik

A YOUNG girl who once had a black mole covering almost the entire white of her left eye now looks just fine.


Video: Watch the STTV news clip here


Doctors took stem cells from 10-year-old Mercy Mohen's own eye, grew them in the laboratory and created a patch to repair her damaged conjunctiva, the thin surface layer of the eye.


It's all looking bright for Mercy, 10, whose left eye used to look black due to a mole (below). Doctors, who removed the mole, grew stem cells taken from her eye and used these to cover her eye's damaged layer. -- HOW HWEE YOUNG
The Singapore doctors are the first in the world to harvest the stem cells - master cells that can replicate themselves - and grow them in a laboratory for use in eye treatment.

They have filed a patent for their pioneering effort, which they had used to help Mercy, who was born with the mole.

She could see, but doctors were worried because the mole was growing into the cornea, the transparent part of the eye in front of the eyeball.

Until recently, she could not have had the her mole removed as it would have left too much of her eye raw and exposed.


Some of her schoolmates at Gan Eng Seng Primary, used to call her 'Black Eye'.

After the operation last year, Mercy kept looking at herself in the mirror, admiring her eye which now looks normal, said her father, Mr Mohen Ambrose.

The doctors who worked this miracle on her are from the Singapore Eye Research Institute (Seri).

The method sounds deceptively simple. Doctors took a tiny amount of stem cells from the conjunctiva high up under Mercy's eyelid.

In the laboratory, they grew these cells into a sheet over 100 times the size of the original bit of cells measuring about 2 sq mm.

After they removed the mole, they stitched this sheet over the exposed areas in the white of her eye.

Seri director Donald Tan, who led the team and heads the opthalmology department at the National University of Singapore, said the conjunctiva stem-cell technique has been used on 24 patients here in the past two years.

But the technique is still on clinical trials and is not yet available to everyone.

Most of the patients had fleshy growths covering their corneas, a common eye problem called pterygium.

The third most common eye problem treated here, it affects one in 10 people over the age of 40, though not all need surgery.

If the growth covers a large part of the iris, or if it is fast growing, doctors would cut off the growth and patch it up with conjunctiva from another part of the eye.

This leaves two scars on the eye.

Associate Professor Tan, said the results are optimistic, though the fleshy part re-grows in about a third of the patients on the stem-cell treatment.

It recurs in 5 to 35 per cent of patients who are not on the stem-cell treatment.

Nevertheless, this is a significant advance in the treatment of eye disease.

The team hopes to have better outcomes in the future.

They also hope to start work on growing retina from stem cells as well as bio-engineering various layers of the cornea for transplant.

The retina lies at the back of the eye and translates what the eye sees to the brain.

If they succeed, it could help a lot of people suffering from retinal diseases or damaged corneas.

The team, which hopes to publish its work in medical journals soon, will present their findings to about 600 eye specialists from 37 countries who will gather here next month for a four-day eye research meeting.

Seri and the Association for Research in Vision and Opthalmology (Arvo) are organising the Meeting on Research in Vision and Opthalmology jointly.

Arvo meetings are considered the foremost eye research gatherings in the world, say eye doctors, and had never been held outside the United States before. Deputy Prime Minister Tony Tan will open the meeting which features more than 70 speakers.