Real Life Nerds Grow the Building Blocks for New Eyes

What happens when nerds collaborate on a problem?

Wonderful things.

At the Osaka University in Japan, ophthalmologist Kohji Nishida and a team of researchers cultivated human cells to produce different types of eye tissue, including corneal, retinal and lens cells. Because the cells could be grown separately from each other, the group was able to remove distinct cells.

So, what does this mean? They can grow entire sheets of corneal cells that could be used for transplants to replace defective corneas.

So far, using the tissue to as a replacement has only been tried on rabbits, but it could easily be used to study how eye tissue and congenital eye diseases develop, and it's not far from being a possible cure for types of blindness in humans.

Read more about this story in Nature.