Indian Company Sucessfully Bioengineers Human Cornea Tissue With Hope To Restore Vision

Pandorum Technologies, a biotech startup which majors in tissue engineering, was known as the first Indian tech firm to 3D-print liver tissue of the human for medical study purpose several years ago. Now, the scientists here have gained a new achievement for developing a bio-engineered cornea tissue that can not only support the scarless healing of human corneal injuries but also help with restoring vision using bio-generation.

Corneal wounds or disorders impacting on the cornea, the eye’s outermost layer, are among the main causes of losing vision worldwide, as per the WHO. It is known that over a million people in India suffer from bilateral vision loss because of corneal wounds, in addition to an increasing number of people having unilateral corneal blindness.

And while one of the effective ways to restore vision is corneal transplants by removing opaque corneal tissue, the current source of available corneas for transplantation is limited.

To handle this issue, Pandorum has co-operated with L.V. Prasad Eye Insitute in Hyderabad to develop bio-engineered cornea tissues to completely eliminating all obstacles of limited cornea sources.

Pandorum’s scientists have created a novel hydrogel which is able to transfer corneal stem cells to the injured area to enhance scarless reparation and corneal tissue regeneration.

We can apply this hydrogel to corneal wounds directly with the least invasive manner. Also, it can be 3D printed as a corneal tissue piece with the shape of a disc or as corneal lenticules for lamellar keratoplasty, a surgery to partially replace damaged cornea.

As per Pandorum Technologies’ Co-Founder and Director, Anrun Chandru, bio-engineering important tissues like cornea is considered a big achievement for all scientists here.

In addition, he also said that that innovation allows the company to walk on the international stage and is able to be widely carried out thanks to the excellent support of the government for the biotech startups in India, the investors support, and the company’s engineers, scientists, and transplant surgeons.

Pandorum that was established by Dr. Tuhin Bhomick and Arun Chandru in 2011 gets the support of the Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC) of the Department of Biotechnology and has laboratories at the Bangalore BioInnovation Centre and at Bangalore-based Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms.

The company showcased its bio-engineered cornea tissue-related pre-clinical trial discovery at the ARVO 2019 (Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology) annual meeting taking place in Vancouver, Canada. AVRO, established in 1928, is the biggest research organization in eye and vision across the world with a team of 12,000 clinicians and researchers from more than 75 countries.

As per Dr. Virender Sangwan, a cornea surgeon, the bio-engineered cornea of Pandorum is considered a transformational tech and able to result in scarless healing of human corneal wounds without rejection corneal graft. In a way, this kind of technology could meet the demand for the healing of corneal wounds and perforations as well as the total or partial cornea replacement.

Currently, corneal surgeons Dr. Sayan Basu and Dr. Virender Sangwan in coordination with Dr. Vivek Singh have been carrying out pre-clinical findings comprising of clinically related corneal injury models in rabbits. This team hopes to pilot human studies sometime next year.

Dr. Singh says:

Besides 500 Startups, investors of Pandorum are Kotak Investment Advisors, KITVEN, 021 Capital, Indian Angel Network, TK Kurien, Sunil Munjal, Sachin Bansal, and Binny Bansal.