A year ago, Canadian Taylor Binns was slowly going blind after developing a rare and painful eye disorder that affected his corneas. Today, he's driving, reading and living a normal life because of a revolutionary stem-cell treatment completed by a team of doctors at Toronto Western Hospital.
"Everything you could do before kind of gets taken away day by day, and it just got worse and worse," he told CTV News this week in a video update, which made Reddit's front page.
For two years, Binns faced countless scans, tests and disheartening misdiagnoses before doctors of Toronto's University Health Network identified Binns' mysterious disease as Limbal Stem Cell Deficiency. The unknown disease affected the stem cells that keep the corneas in his eyes healthy. The deficiency causes excruciating pain and blurred vision.
Binns became the first patient in Ontario to undergo Limbal Stem Cell Transplant, led by Dr. Allan Slomovic. Binns' younger sister Tori donated some of the stem cells from her eyes for the procedure. Within a month, Binns was seeing 20/20 in one eye and 20/40 in another, Dr. Slomovic told CTV. The Canadian Ophthalmological Society and University of Toronto’s ophthalmology department say they hope to see more of these procedures being performed in the future.
Binns, now 24, sets his sights on practicing medicine and becoming an eye surgeon at UHN. Watch the following video, produced by the University Health Network, about Binns' life-changing Limbal Stem Cell transplant: