Pending approval by the Ministry of Health and Welfare, a clinical trial application by the Acro Biomedical Co to transplant a porcine cornea into a human might prove to be a blessing for patients waiting for corneal transplants, the company said yesterday.
Corneal transplants are difficult to perform and often result in transplant rejection, subjecting patients having undergone transplant surgery to take anti-rejection agents on a regular basis, it said.
The company noted that a pig’s eye and a human eye are similar in size, while the tissue structure of the cornea is identical, Acro chief executive Hsieh Dar-jen (謝達仁) said.
After extracting a porcine cornea using supercritical carbon dioxide (SCCO2) technology, the cornea is lysed of cell debris, including the nuclei, while the stromal structures and appropriate mechanical properties are retained, Hsieh said.
The corneas have been tested on rabbits and Chihuahuas without side effects, Hsieh said, adding that the company was in the process of applying for clinical trials on human test subjects.
If approved, the company is looking to conduct 20 clinical trials starting next year, Hsieh said, adding that if the clinical trials achieve 100 percent success, porcine cornea extracted with SCCO2 technology would officially become a transplantable organ by 2020.
Acro has also authorized another biomedical company based in Australia, which is to launch simultaneous clinical trials, he said.
The cornea’s primary function is to bend light and if it is damaged, it can cause blurriness or photophobia, Kaohsiung Veterans General Hospital doctor Lee Yin-yang (李尹暘) said.
If the cornea becomes severely scarred, a transplant is required to regain eyesight, Lee said.
However, patients often have to wait one to two years for a transplant, said Lee, citing WHO statistics that showed an annual increase of 600,000 individuals requiring corneal transplants, while cornea donations number only 100,000.
If the trials are a success, it would greatly benefit patients waiting for transplants, Lee said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching