Photo: University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics
(Iowa City, IA) -- A What Cheer, Iowa man is recovering after having an artificial iris implant. The new technology means 68-year-old Larry Molyneux can see and his injured eye looks as if it was never injured by a sliver of steel.
Artificial iris implants have been around for decades, but only done in a handful of places in the U-S. In 2018 the first iris prosthesis was approved for use in the U.S.
Molyneux is the first patient in Iowa to receive this new, human-like silicone prosthetic iris.
“This is a significant advance in technology,” says Christopher Sales, MD, MPH, an ophthalmologist and surgeon at UI Hospitals & Clinics who performed Molyneux’s surgery. “Early implants didn’t look human – they helped with vision but significantly affected the appearance of the patient’s eye.”