'In that moment, that was everything to me': Patient describes joy of regaining vision in 1 eye after new stem cell therapy

On Independence Day 2020, Nick Kharufeh was enjoying a fireworks display on the street near his aunt's house in California.

Then, within a split second, the fun stopped.

A wayward firework meandered off course and exploded on the ground near Kharufeh, and bits of the explosive struck the cornea of his left eye. The accident left Kharufeh — who was 23 years old, and six years into training to be a commercial pilot at the time — completely blind in one eye.

"My dad was right outside [the house] and it was dark out, so he couldn't fully tell what had happened," Kharufeh told Live Science. "And I was like, 'I feel like I can't see out of my left eye.'"

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At the hospital, doctors initially feared that Kharufeh's eye had been completely destroyed and would need to be taken out. However, after cleaning the debris from his eye, a specialist saw that aside from his cornea, the rest of Kharufeh's eye remained intact.

What followed was months of treatments, involving waking up multiple times in the night to apply medicated eye drops, taking drugs to manage the pain, and undergoing a couple of surgeries, which included cleaning up the remaining debris and an unsuccessful attempt at reconstructing his eyelid.

"It was a rough few months," Kharufeh said. "I didn't leave the house, I didn't tell anybody what happened because I was kind of embarrassed about it — because your eyes are the window to your soul, so I felt like my identity was just gone."

Later that year, Kharufeh's mom told him about an advertisement she'd seen from the Mass Eye and Ear, a Harvard teaching hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. The hospital was seeking volunteers to participate in a clinical trial of a new stem cell therapy for patients with irreversible corneal damage.

The experimental therapy — called "cultivated autologous limbal epithelial cell transplantation" (CALEC) — works by taking stem cells from a patient's healthy eye, growing them into sheets of cells in the lab and then transplanting them into the damaged eye. Once implanted, these new sheets of cells form a surface on which normal tissue can grow back.

Kharufeh decided to make the move to Boston with his mom to take part in the trial, which was starting the following January in 2021.

"At first I was hesitant because they had to do surgery on my good eye, so I was really nervous," Kharufeh said.

But then, immediately after the first of two transplants, Kharufeh saw positive results.

He remembers the moment when he walked into his Airbnb in Massachusetts and could see the bright blue color of his comforter. At that time, he was about eight months out from his firework injury.

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Nick's eye approximately two years after receiving his first stem cell transplant at Mass Eye and Ear.

"I'll never forget [that moment]," Kharufeh said. "And it sounds so little. It's just like, 'Okay, a little blue comforter.' But in that moment that was everything to me, and I literally cried for so long."

Prior to Kharufeh receiving the new CALEC therapy, the treatment had initially been tested in a small clinical trial of just four patients with corneal damage. That trial, whose results were shared in 2018, marked the first-ever test of a stem cell therapy for the eyes in the U.S., the research team said at the time.

After the small trial demonstrated the therapy's safety and efficacy, the team conducted a larger trial with 15 patients, one of whom was Kharufeh. The findings of the larger trial were published March 4 in the journal Nature Communications, and overall, the treatment was found to be effective at repairing blinding damage to the cornea in 93% of the patients involved. Follow-up trials are still to come and could ensure the treatment's official approval.

Now, at age 28 and five years out from his injury, Kharufeh still lives in Boston where he works in sales for a travel company. The vision from his left eye is not perfect, but he says that the injury doesn't cause him issues during his everyday life. For instance, if he were to cover his right eye with his hand, he would still be able to locate objects and navigate himself around.

In April, he intends to run the Boston Marathon to help raise money for Mass Eye and Ear.

"I think it's given me a whole new life," Kharufeh said of the stem-cell therapy. "Now it's the point where I can actually feel normal."