Ryan Dimmock
School of Pharmacy and Bioengineering
Remaking the Human Limbus
The cornea is the outermost surface of the eye . During the course of adult life the cornea has to perform as a barrier and enable us to see . To achieve this it must feed / maintain a constant supply of adult stem cells which replenish this surface . The limbal epithelial stem cell ( LESC ) niche serves as this source of stem cells . The niche resides in the limbus , located as the border between the corneal surface and the conjunctiva . The LESC niche is an undulating crypt structure where the LESC ’ s reside in the basal regions . The structure of the limbus and the associated physical cues imparted by its shape is proposed to be crucial to maintaining this stem cell population . Tissue damage and age-related degradation can cause a loss of limbal structural features , resulting in limbal stem cell deficiency ( LSCD ), which can lead to blindness . Current work is exploiting polymer wrinkling techniques to mimic the undulations of the limbal anatomic niche structure . Different wrinkling methods have been explored and developed with the application of limbal cells isolated from human donor tissue . This development is moving towards a dynamized bioreactor model which can be used to investigate niche structural changes during LSCD development .
Postgraduate Conference 2021 Page 21