Professor Gerard Sutton is one of Australia’s foremost ophthalmic surgeons. He and the consortium he co-founded – Bienco – have just received $35 million from the federal government’s Medical Research Future Fund to produce bioengineered corneas which stand to cure blindness among millions of people around the world.

Fitz: Can you explain what your research is seeking to do and how close you are to doing it?

GS: OK, so while the eyes are “the windows to the soul”, it’s actually the cornea that is the clear window at the front of the eye – like the windshield of your car. For most of history, when that window has been damaged through disease or injury, you were blinded or sight impaired. Then we learnt how to transplant corneas from dead people – an important but complex process. But now we’re close to being able to actually make them, grow them, we can take some skin from a donor and create, on a very large scale, those windows in front of the eye. And, to be honest, sometimes it stuns even me.

Gerard Sutton, one of Australia’s leading ophthalmic surgeons with a donated cornea, in 2021. Now, he says, “we’re close to being able to actually make them, grow them”.Credit: James Brickwood

Fitz: And this, clearly, will revolutionise the field?

GS: Yes, because even in the age of transplanting corneas, there has always been a terrible shortage: so many people around the world wanting them and us having so few to transplant.

Fitz: So what has been the genesis – and it does sound biblical, allowing the blind to see again – of this breakthrough?

GS: For the last quarter-century, I’ve been visiting Cambodia and Myanmar for a few weeks every year, doing ophthalmic surgery on often disease-ravaged patients, or those from war-torn communities where their eyes have been damaged by things like shrapnel – while also teaching their own ophthalmic surgeons how to do the transplants. And blindness is a terrible problem in those countries, not just for the blind, but also for the whole community. They need to have someone to look after that person and their actual capacity to contribute to society and to the economy is lost. So if you can actually bring someone back into the community by doing a procedure which cures that blindness, then you’re making a huge difference, not just to that person, but to the entire society.

Fitz: And so, this one time … ?

GS: This one time, in 2004, I was visiting Myanmar before the democratic revolution and I had with me, on ice, four corneas donated from the NSW Eye Bank. There had been a small article in the national newspaper that I was coming and when I got there, I found well over 1000 blind people in the hospital grounds, wanting to see me. This left me having to decide over the next few days, just which patients were best suited to having the transplant, while the rest would stay blind.