Constantin G. Economou Memorial Lecture

Irregular healing following corneal injury accounts for approximately 1.5 million new cases of monocular blindness every year. Unlike cataracts, such cases of blindness are irreversible without corneal transplantation. Efforts to develop biomaterials that promote wound healing have been largely unsuccessful for corneal applications where stringent optical requirements necessitate a transparent wound dressing to foster orderly, scar-free tissue remodeling. We approach this problem with a novel artificial extracellular maxtrix protein-polymer scaffold that contains structural elements unique to the cornea in addition to cell-binding domains derived from fibronectin. We show that our material is well-suited to corneal applications because of tis transparency, ability to recruit epithelial and fibroblast cells and capability to regulate the fibroblast repair phenotype.