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The first time Phillip Durst saw the big A on the chart, he could hardly believe it. It was the first in a series of letters to check his vision in his left eye. “They keep flipping the chart and it keeps getting smaller and smaller, and I keep identifying the letters — that was huge,” said Durst. “It’s like a miracle.”

A year earlier, in April 2017, Durst had lost sight from that same eye after it was hit by a caustic water treatment solution in a work accident. The damage was so severe that a standard corneal transplant would not resolve it. But in April 2018, he underwent a new, innovative procedure: An eye stem cell transplant led by Ula Jurkunas, the associate director of the cornea service at Mass Eye and Ear in Boston.

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Durst, now 51 years old, is the first of four patients who were included in a Phase 1 trial of Cultivated Autologous Limbal Epithelial Cell (CALEC) transplant, the results of which were published Friday in Science Advances. The procedure allowed him to become a suitable candidate for another surgery, the artificial corneal transplant, while rehabilitating his vision — and his life.

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