Perfusion device keeps donor eyes alive, a step toward whole-eye transplants
A team led by Pia Cosma at the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona has built a perfusion system, called the ECaBox, that keeps a donor eyeball alive after death by pumping oxygen-rich fluid through the ophthalmic artery while holding it at controlled temperature and pressure. In tests, pig eyes left untreated degraded within a day, but eyes on the device stayed significantly more viable and even regained their retinal response to light — a signal lost on removal and restored after about 15 minutes of perfusion. In a follow-up using 12 eyes from six human donors, perfused eyes preserved retinal integrity better than untreated pairs.
The relevance is to whole-eye transplantation. A landmark 2023 case in New York transplanted an entire human eye that survived but could not see; keeping the retina and its neurons functional between donor and recipient is one of the main obstacles to restoring vision. Preserving that tissue is a necessary precondition, though it is far from sufficient — surgeons would still need to reconnect the optic nerve, which the field has not solved.
The results are described in a preprint that has not yet been peer-reviewed, so the findings remain preliminary.