The collective order of human corneal endothelial cells as a unified biomarker for in vitro cultured cells and in vivo regenerated tissue

Approximately 200,000 corneal transplantations are performed worldwide yearly, and more than half of them are applied to patients with corneal endothelial dysfunction. Recently, the restoration of functional corneas by injecting culture-expanded cells has developed in contrast to the conventional transplantation which relies on a limited number of donors’ corneas. This novel treatment opens up the potential to cure more patients with less surgical invasion and allows the utilization of cells with consistent and controlled quality. In this talk, I will introduce a unified physical biomarker for the quality assessment of corneal endothelial cells in in vitro culture and the predictive diagnosis of in vivo tissues using a single equation based on the collective order of cells. Taking an analogy to the two-dimensional colloidal assembly, the spatial arrangement of cells is generalized in terms of many-body interactions, and the “spring constant” of the underlying interaction potential is calculated from microscopy images. I also would like to discuss our recent approach to characterize the local structure of the arrangement of cells based on the topological data analysis.