A device that revives eyeballs from dead donors could make eye transplants possible

It’s not easy to transplant a whole human eye. The surgery is difficult. And the eyes themselves start to degenerate as soon as they’ve left the body. When surgeons attempted it a few years ago , the newly-transplanted eye wasn’t able to see. But researchers believe they might have a solution: a device that maintains and revives freshly removed eyeballs using a technique called perfusion. Perfusion works by providing surgically-removed organs with some of the oxygen and nutrients they typically get when they’re inside a body. Treated eyes don’t degrade as quickly, and appear to retain the ability to transmit electrical signals, and potentially see. The device could one day make eye transplantations a viable possibility. “It’s really cool,” says Shannon Tessier at Massachusetts General Hospital, who was not involved in the research but studies perfusion of other organs. “It could be a new frontier for retina preservation.” Pia Cosma at the Centre for Genomic Regulation at the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology in Spain and her colleagues have spent years developing their device. The Eye-in-a-Care-Box (ECaBox), as they call it, delivers an oxygen-rich supply of fluid through the artery that normally supplies the eye with blood. The eye itself sits on a “bed,” and excess fluids are drained away. And while the device itself is sealed to maintain a specific temperature and pressure, a clear window on its side allows researchers to study and image the eye while it’s inside. Cosma and her colleagues started experimenting with pig eyes, which are anatomically similar to human eyes but easier to get hold of (the team got theirs from a local slaughterhouse). Pig eyes that are kept at room temperature outside of the device start to degenerate pretty quickly. The team found that cells in the eye shrank, and the eyes started to lose their structure. Cooling the organs didn’t help preserve them, either—the eyes degenerated within 24 hours even when they were kept at 4°