Samantha Arsenault, MD, of the Henry Ford Health System, offered her feedback on highlights from AAO 2025, specifically the interesting findings from Cornea Day.
Samantha Arsenault, MD:
Hi, I’m Sam Arsenault. I’m a cornea, cataract, and refractive surgeon in Detroit. I work at Henry Ford and I practice out of Detroit and West Bloomfield locations in Michigan. I always love coming to AAO. It’s a great time to network with my colleagues in cornea, cataract, as well as my colleagues in other fields. A highlight for me is always subspecialty day. I always enjoy attending cornea and refractive subspecialty days. There were some great talks this year. I was particularly excited to hear about the updates on endothelial cell injection treatments. This is a procedure in which we take donor endothelial cells that have been cultured. They’re injected into the anterior chamber in a 1-time procedure, and they’re allowed to adhere, proliferate, and hopefully restore corneal clarity. One exciting advantage that this offers over traditional endothelial keratoplasty, you have one donor cornea that produces one corneal graft, whereas with endothelial cell injection, you have the potential for one donor to produce endothelial cells that can treat up to 1,000 patients. This is huge when we think about access and availability, especially in regions where corneal graft tissue may not be as readily available.
Dr. Barry Lee gave a great update talk during cornea day to update us on where we’re at with endothelial cell injection. He presented Dr. Kinoshita’s 10-year data from his group out of Japan, which is very promising. At 10 years, 83% of patients who were treated still were maintaining corneal transparency and the gains in best corrective visual acuity, central corneal thickness were maintained over that period. This is very exciting. I am looking forward to see where this will go next and when this will be more available to us in the states to use to treat our patients who have endothelial disease.
I also enjoyed hearing the talk about neurotrophic keratitis from Sumitra Khandelwal. She gave updates on some of the newer technologies that we’re using to treat these patients, such as insulin eye drops, which I’ve had good experience with clinically as well, and newer surgical technologies such as BrightMEM, which also has early promising data. I’ve had preliminary good experiences in the OR with this technology as well.
Then finally, a highlight for me with this conference is always seeing surgical videos from my colleagues. I always leave AAO with new surgical pearls and techniques that I’m excited to try and I look forward to coming back next year.
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