A Cornea Grown in a Lab, and a Patient Who Can See Again

For as long as there have been corneal transplants, the new cornea has come from someone who died and chose to give it. That system restores sight every day, and it has never had enough to go around. More than 13 million people worldwide are waiting for corneal tissue that may not arrive in time.

In October, at a hospital in Haifa, a surgeon gave a legally blind patient a cornea that had never belonged to anyone. It was grown in a laboratory, from human cells, and printed to shape.

The company that spent a decade on it

The cornea is the clear front window of the eye, the dome over the iris and pupil. Injury, infection, and disease can cloud it, and when it clouds badly enough, the fix has long been the same: replace it with donated tissue. Precise Bio, a regenerative-medicine company in Greensboro, North Carolina, has spent more than ten years chasing a different answer, and on October 29, 2025, at Rambam Medical Center, it reached a patient for the first time.

The implant is called PB-001. It is built from cultured human corneal cells that the company isolates, grows, and prints into a precisely layered structure at a lab inside Sheba Medical Center in Israel. The patient who received it was blind in the treated eye. The procedure was the first time in the world that a working, cell-based, 3D-bio-printed cornea has been placed in a person, the company announced.

“For the first time in history, we’ve witnessed a cornea created in the lab, from living human cells, bring sight back to a human being,” said Professor Michael Mimouni, who leads the cornea unit at Rambam and performed the surgery. “This is a game changer.”

Turning scarcity into supply

The reason a lab-grown cornea matters is arithmetic. Every donated cornea helps one or two people. A cornea that can be manufactured does not wait on anyone’s passing, and it does not sit at the mercy of the transplant waiting list.

That is the ambition Precise Bio’s co-founder and chief executive, Aryeh Batt, described when the result was announced. “Imagine a world where a single donor cornea can give rise to hundreds of lab-grown implants, transforming scarcity into abundance,” he said. The implants are made to match the clarity and the mechanical feel of a natural cornea, and to be frozen and shipped, ready to use, on the standard tools surgeons already handle in the operating room.

Anthony Atala, the company’s other co-founder and the director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, framed it as a shift in what transplant medicine can even be. “The ability to produce patient-ready tissue on demand could lead the way towards reshaping transplant medicine as we know it,” he said.

What has happened since

This is one small trial, still running. PB-001 is being tested in a Phase 1 study designed to check that it is safe and well tolerated in ten to fifteen patients whose corneas have clouded because the inner layer of cells stopped doing its job. A first read on how well it restores vision comes at the six-month mark.

The early news has held. By late February 2026, the second and third patients had received the implant, Israel’s Ministry of Health had reviewed the first results and cleared the study to continue, and all three procedures had gone through with no serious complications. The first patient, the one who was blind in that eye, has kept improving.

Precise Bio expects to report the trial’s topline results by the end of 2026. Whether a printed cornea can do for the next patient what it did for the first is the question the rest of the study exists to answer. For one person, in one eye, the answer is already in.