A 91-year-old man has become the first patient in the country to receive an artificial cornea. Cecil Farley faced a year-long wait for sight-saving surgery after a human cornea transplant failed, but his surgeon offered him the chance to skip the queue by using an artificial one. Mr Farley, married to Elizabeth, 83, said: “I can still see my wife after 63 years of marriage.
It makes your life fuller when your eyes work properly. You don’t realise how debilitating it is until it happens to you.” The operation he had replaced the inner part of his cornea with an artificial lens attached to the eye by a single stitch.
There is a worldwide shortage of donated human corneas, and up to a two-year waiting list for transplants in the UK. The UK needs 350 donated eyes each week but currently only gets 88. Consultant ophthalmologist Thomas Poole said of the artificial cornea, developed by British scientists: “One of the beauties is that it is not human tissue so the body does not try to reject it.
” Mr Poole, who performed the surgery at Frimley Park Hospital in Surrey, added: “I think this may end up replacing human corneas for certain types of corneal graft patients. In maybe 10 or 20 years’ time, this may become the norm where we don’t need a human cornea, we just take one out of the box.” Mr Farley, of Chobham, known to friends as John, had been suffering problems with his right eye for around 15 years.
When a cornea is damaged, it can become clouded and change sha.