RESUMEN
PURPOSE: To report the surgical management of extensive epibulbar dermoids with autologous oral mucous membrane transplantation. OBSERVATIONS: While rare, extensive dermoids that encroach upon the visual axis carry a poor prognosis. We report the case of a 7-week old premature male infant who presented with large bilateral epibulbar dermoids obscuring the visual axis. He was treated first with sequential bilateral optical iridectomies under the clearest corneal areas, followed several months later by sequential dermoid excision and amniotic membrane transplantation in each eye. He subsequently underwent autologous "simple" oral mucosal epithelial transplantation (SOMET) as well as strabismus surgery. Conclusions and Importance: Here we present the first case, to the best of our knowledge, of the use of SOMET in managing post-operative pseudopterygium following dermoid excision. To our knowledge it is the also the first application of this technique in a young pediatric patient. A good clinical outcome may be achieved with SOMET, which may offer a minimally invasive alternative to other traditional modalities.
RESUMEN
BACKGROUND: Retinal pigment epithelium cells play an important role in the pathogenesis of age related macular degeneration. Their morphological, molecular and functional phenotype changes in response to various stresses. Functional profiling of genes can provide useful information about the physiological state of cells and how this state changes in response to disease or treatment. In this study, we have constructed a functional profile of the genes expressed by the ARPE-19 cell line of retinal pigment epithelium. METHODS: Using Affymetrix MAS 5.0 microarray analysis, genes expressed by ARPE-19 cells were identified. Using GeneChip annotations, these genes were classified according to their known functions to generate a functional gene expression profile. RESULTS: We have determined that of approximately 19,044 unique gene sequences represented on the HG-U133A GeneChip, 6,438 were expressed in ARPE-19 cells irrespective of the substrate on which they were grown (plastic, fibronectin, collagen, or Matrigel). Rather than focus our subsequent analysis on the identity or level of expression of each individual gene in this large data set, we examined the number of genes expressed within 130 functional categories. These categories were selected from a library of HG-U133A GeneChip annotations linked to the Affymetrix MAS 5.0 data sets. Using this functional classification scheme, we were able to categorize about 70% of the expressed genes and condense the original data set of over 6,000 data points into a format with 130 data points. The resulting ARPE-19 Functional Gene Expression Profile is displayed as a percentage of ARPE-19-expressed genes. CONCLUSION: The Profile can readily be compared with equivalent microarray data from other appropriate samples in order to highlight cell-specific attributes or treatment-induced changes in gene expression. The usefulness of these analyses is based on the assumption that the numbers of genes expressed within a functional category provide an indicator of the overall level of activity within that particular functional pathway.