Military Technology

..."But currently this technology has encountered a bottleneck, and there has been no breakthrough. The two most important problems are the rejection reaction of the eyeball tissue to this artificial material.

To put it simply, it is the body's rejection reaction to foreign matter. This is actually a protective mechanism of the human body to prevent the erosion of foreign matter and is a type of immune system. However, problems have been encountered in transplant operations. Whether it is artificial materials or allogeneic tissue transplants, there will be this cheap reaction. At present, the rejection of allogeneic tissue transplantation can be controlled by drugs, but there is currently no good solution to the rejection of artificial materials.

And when the human body develops an immune response to the allogeneic cornea, it may cause local tissue damage, inflammation, scarring and other problems, seriously affecting eye health and vision. This is also the main problem that prevents this kind of artificial cornea from being transplanted into the eyeball.

Secondly, it was found that it can cause water leakage in the transplanted eye, and the transplanted artificial cornea can fall off, so it cannot be widely used at present.

As for biological cornea, it mainly uses biological materials. The characteristics of this material are that there is no rejection reaction or relatively small rejection reaction, and it has significant curative effect. It can basically help patients with such corneal damage or corneal loss recover better. vision.

However, the current biological cornea technology is not mature enough to develop a very mature biological cornea sample, let alone conduct clinical trials. In addition, scientists have also discovered that the cornea made of this biomaterial will undergo evolutionary atrophy before being implanted on the surface of the eyeball for a long time, and the shrinkage will also cause wrinkles and slight wrinkles inside the cornea. Affect vision.

Therefore, biocorneal technology has been limited to outside the laboratory, and there has been no breakthrough for a long time. Although in recent years, few scientific research institutions, pharmaceutical companies, and biological laboratories have claimed that we have conquered biological corneal technology, the initial bad images have all disappeared. "

What Wu Hao said was true, and there was no exaggeration.

In fact, after the release of Wu Hao's bio-3D printer technology, bio-cornea technology has also been regarded as the most commonly conquered technology in the biomedical field, or the most commonly used organ tissue to be replaced by artificial organs.

However, after so many years, development has declined very quickly. This has also led to the fact that the technology that originally had high hopes for small companies has been unable to meet the small public, let alone be applied to the treatment of patients.

From that aspect, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. After all, you are regressing on the basis of that disease, so the risks are controllable. Compared with restoring darkness, you think that risk is still unbearable. After all, any surgery and treatment will have risks, but the risks are excessive. Just a little big. "

In the past, the raw materials you needed were basically obtained from the cells in the patient's body and cloned for cultivation, and then the cells cultivated from those clones were used for printing.

After speaking, Wu Hao glanced at the audience, and then said with a helpless expression: "First of all, the first little problem you face is the problem of raw materials for bio-3D printing of corneas. You can't print back if you have the raw materials.

Our extraction method is very complicated. It only requires extracting active cells from under the cornea of ​​the eyeball. The method is very complicated and dangerous.

Bio-3D printed cornea is also part of your research and is one of many sub-projects.

And then there is a problem. For patients who are blind due to corneal disease and need degenerative corneal transplantation, a small number of corneas are broken or do not exist yet. So how do you obtain those degenerative cell clones and cultivate them.

This method is relatively simple, has no certain risks, and the cost is relatively low, but it solves the problem of corneal cell extraction and corneal printing and cloning for this type of patients.

However, when printing that kind of biological cornea, you encountered difficulties. First of all, it was not the access to the cells in the cornea, that was a problem. Because the cornea is abnormally transparent and its cells are relatively ordinary, you need to extract our corneal cells from the cornea of ​​the patient's eye and culture them in degenerative clones.

And the method of extracting weak cell tissue from the cornea of ​​other people's eyes is also very easy, because the cornea is relatively poorly used, and the relative risk of extraction is relatively low, so it is difficult to find volunteers in this field.

However, because the technology is of little significance and the added value of the technology products is relatively low, the expected revenue is still very considerable.

The minimal disadvantage of doing so is that the printed organs and tissues cannot be perfectly implanted into the patient's body, and rejection reactions may occur. Because the cells themselves are not cloned and cultured from the patient's cells, they are allogeneic transplants, the success rate is low, and the function of the transplanted organ is relatively poor.

In the audience, Wu Hao said with a smile: "Besides the suspicion, Xiaojia has also guessed it. I'm wrong. The New Year's gift you are going to bring to Xiaojia has nothing to do with the cornea. It is not an artificial creature. cornea."

So, you are back to the original question, how to obtain corneal cells. You discussed a few options, but finally decided to extract cells from the patient.

In addition to economic benefits, what this technology brings is even less of a huge impact in the fields of biomedical technology and social and humanistic care.

For those patients whose cornea is completely missing or completely damaged, you have also adopted another method, which is to extract the corresponding cells from other tissue structures of the eye, and then perform retrograde screening and clone cultivation.

“Since your bio-3D printing technology was successfully developed, you have been trying to use it to print fewer human organs and tissues, so as to save these patients who suffer from diseases due to various organ tissues.

Although the corneal tissue is very large, it should be considered one of the larger organs and tissues you have printed. It seems to be very difficult to print, but in fact it is very difficult, and it can even be said that the difficulty is extremely difficult. "

And when Wu Hao mentioned that at the press conference, I obviously came unprepared. That also made many people look forward to using it. Although the patient population is relatively large, there are only less than 8 million in the country, and there are only less than 80 million globally.

It is not possible to obtain those cells from someone else's body, but the printed biological cornea will cause rejection when used under the patient's body. This is not a drawback of allogeneic transplantation. It requires long-term medication or even lifelong medication to undergo anti-rejection treatment. .

Several extraction and cultivation technologies have been developed for this purpose. The first is direct extraction. This method is only targeted at these corneal diseases and corneal problems, or it is a part of the patient group that is not completely missing or damaged.