Review on advances in corneal tissue engineering

This paper focuses on the description of corneal structure traditional methods of transplantation and emerging techniques in the field of tissue engineering. Corneal disease is one of the most important causes of blindness worldwide with about 10 million people affected. Transplantation of a donor cornea is the most traditionally used method to treat corneal problems with penetrating keratoplasty being the most commonly used technique to date. However the use of a donor cornea has a number of drawbacks including immunological rejection which leads to graft detachment. For this reason there is a need to look for new methods to approach the replacement of the damaged cornea such as tissue engineering.