There are many dystrophies related corneal endothelium resulting in edema, loss of transparency and blindness, finally. Currently, transplantation is only surgical treatment for patients with these corneal endothelial dystrophies, however, the limitation of transplantation is the absolute deficiency of donor cornea. Very recently, to overcome this issue of limited supply of donor cornea, regenerative medicine including stem cell therapy and tissue engineering has been widely attempted and success for human clinical trial.
In this review, recent advances for the regeneration of corneal endothelial cell (CEnC) as (1)isolation and culture methods of CEnC for the somatic cell source, (2)stem cell source for CEnC as embryonic, induce pluripotent stem cell (iPS) and adult stem cell, (3)tissue engineering techniques as cell sheet engineering and development of scaffold materials and finally (4)the application of silk as a biomaterial for cornea by our laboratory have been introduced.
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