A PIONEERING form of surgery has been developed that can restore the sight of patients by using stem cells to encourage damaged eyes to repair themselves.

A team of British specialists has successfully treated more than a dozen patients with impaired corneas by transplanting human stem cells grown in a laboratory on to their eyes.

Recent operations on ten patients showed that the technique restored sight in seven cases of people who had been blinded after getting acid, alkali and boiling metal in their eyes, or because of congenital disorders.

Many of the patients treated at the Centre for Sight, Queen Victoria Hospital, in East Grinstead, West Sussex, had been told that they had no hope of getting their sight back, or had already undergone failed corneal transplants.

The process involves taking stem cells, which occur naturally in the eye, and developing them into sheets of cells in the laboratory. These are transplanted on to the surface of the eye where they are held in place by an amniotic membrane, which dissolves away as the sheet fuses to the eye.

Sheraz Daya, an ophthalmic surgeon leading the Sussex team, which has spent five years perfecting the technique, said that doctors had been astonished at how the cells appeared to trigger the eye’s natural regeneration of its damaged surface. Tests on the patients after a year revealed no trace of the DNA of the stem-cell donor, meaning that the repair was carried out by the eye’s own cells — a permanent healing process that does not require long-term use of powerful drugs to suppress the patient’s immune system.

Mr Daya said: “The technique not only works, but there was no donor tissue there. That is what really blew our minds. The cells appeared to have been shed from the eye and replaced by the patient’s own, much more hardy, cells.”

The team, including scientists at the hospital’s McIndoe Surgical Centre, now hopes to identify the processes at work, which might then be used to trigger the repair of other damaged tissue around the body. Details of the trial were revealed this month at an international conference of eye specialists in America. All the patients in the trial had corneas that had become damaged because they no longer had limbal stem cells, which are normally under the eyelid and help to keep the surface of the cornea clear, protecting it.

Edward Bailey, who lost his sight after caustic acid landed in his left eye while he was cleaning pipes at a yoghurt factory, said that the operation had transformed his life.

“It was the most emotional moment,” Mr Bailey, 65, said. “I couldn’t believe it. For ten years all I had seen was shades of black and grey, then after I had the operation the nurse came by and I saw a flash of blue from her uniform. I went home and when I took the patch off my eye, I had my vision back. It is only when you lose something like sight that you realise how precious it is.”

Nadey Hakim, a consultant surgeon at St Mary’s Hospital, London, said that it was likely that such action could be mimicked in other organs, thus reducing the need for organ transplants. Professor Hakim said: “The hope is that stem cells will one day be used to generate large quantities of cells and tissues and possibly entire organs damaged by disease and injury. It is a dream.”

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