In an interview with the Brisbane Times, an Australian ophthalmologist and biotech entrepreneur lays out his vision for a world in which curing blindness in millions of people worldwide is easy and can be done with a bit of cell replication and a 3D printer.
Professor Gerard Sutton is co-founder of Bienco, which he claims now possesses a product—both physical and intellectual—that will soon be able to mass-produce natural corneas for transplantation into the blind.
Cornea transplantation is the most common way of restoring lost sight, but it’s a very technical procedure that relies on donors. The thin see-through “windscreen” of the eyeball, damage or disease to the cornea is a major cause of non-hereditary blindness worldwide.
In the interview, Sutton’s voice shrinks as he recalls a trip he took to Myanmar in 2004 when he was hoping to help the situation of blindness from the previous civil war by training surgeons to perform cornea transplants. On ice, he said, he had brought along four […]
I have had to wear glasses for decades and would like to try this method ,as long as I do not have to pay for it. Living on Social Security leaves me with NO money near the last part of the month. I could not even survive if I did not have GOOD friends who help me out a lot; and I could not survive without them. My rich Step-Father had no life insurance, and neither did my Mother. The last of my Mother’s money was spent by my stupid Aunt who moved my Mother into a nursing home which cost $138,000 per year and that ate up all of my mother’s money. I even had to sell her Condo for $100,000 to pay off the nursing home with all of that money which my Mother thought would go to me until my Aunt Ruthie moved Mom into that horrible nursing home which di not even take good care of her; it was so sad to see her go. Her mind went long before her body, and she did not even remember that she had a son (ME) the last time I saw her.