Review Article Regenerative Medicine for the Cornea

License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Regenerative medicine for the cornea provides a novel treatment strategy for patients with corneal diseases instead of conventional keratoplasty. Limbal transplantation has been performed in patients with a limbal stem cell deficiency. This procedure requires long-term immunosuppression that involves high risks of serious eye and systemic complications, including infection, glaucoma, and liver dysfunction. To solve these problems, ocular surface reconstruction using cultured limbal or oral mucosal epithelial stem cells has been successfully applied to patients. However, cell sheets must be fabricated in a cell processing center (CPC) under good manufacturing practice conditions for clinical use, and the expenses of maintaining a CPC are too high for all hospitals to cover. Therefore, several hospitals should share one CPC to standardize and spread the application of regenerative therapy using tissue-engineered oral mucosal epithelial cell sheets. Consequently, we developed a cell transportation technique for clinical trial to bridge hospitals. This paper reviews the current status of regenerative medicine for the cornea. 1. The Structure of the Cornea The cornea is an avascular and transparent tissue that forms part of the anterior ocular segment. Together with the sclera, it forms the outer shell of the eyeball. The cornea serves a