CORNEAL GRAFT STUDY

Patient recruitment has commenced for VISICORT, a major new European study that aims to improve corneal graft outcomes.

More than 100,000 corneal transplants are carried out annually worldwide. Immunological rejection remains the most important cause of corneal graft failure, with failure rates of up to 60 per cent at five years in high-risk situations, such as in patients with prior graft failure or herpes keratitis.

VISICORT is a multi-disciplinary research project involving 12 partners from across the EU with expertise in corneal transplantation, cell therapy, immunology, bio-sampling, systems biology/immune profiling and bioinformatics. The project will complete the first ever systematic immune profiling of human corneal transplant recipients. Clinical data and bio-specimens will be collected from over 700 corneal transplant recipients at five leading transplant centres, including the Royal Victoria Eye and Ear Hospital (RVEEH) and the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI), Dublin, Ireland; Aarhus University Hospital, Denmark; Charité University Eye Clinic, Berlin, Germany; University of Bristol and Bristol Eye Hospital, UK; and Nantes University Hospital, France.

The samples will be centrally collated and distributed to cutting-edge laboratories in Edinburgh, UK and Nantes, France for multi-platform profiling and integrated bioinformatics analyses. Profiling data will generate a better understanding of corneal transplant rejection and failure.

This knowledge will be used to develop novel biomarker-based surveillance strategies and, coupled with SME-based expertise in cell product development, will also inform the design and initiation of a clinical trial of stromal stem cell therapy in high-risk human corneal transplant recipients. The VISICORT project is co-ordinated by Prof Matthew Griffin, Professor of Transplant Biology at NUI Galway, Ireland.

Benefiting from a €6million award from the European Commission FP7 programme, the VISICORT project launched in May 2014 and patient recruitment has now opened following the development phase of the project.

“The study is progressing well. We have recruited over 40 patients to the study at RVEEH in the past four months and over 100 patients across all clinical sites,” Conor Murphy PhD, FRCSI (Ophth), Professor of Ophthalmology at RCSI, told EuroTimes.

“It is a strong consortium with an ideal mix of expertise that will enable us to have a real impact on the outcomes of corneal transplantation in the future by improving our understanding of the mechanisms causing transplant failure, identifying biomarkers predicting long-term outcomes and by evaluating a cell based therapy for patients with a poor prognosis for transplant survival,” he said.

Conor Murphy: conorcmurphy@rcsi.ie

* For more information visit: www.visicort.eu