What if you thought you could invent a device to help millions of blind people see again? You knew it might be a long slog, and there were no guarantees — but if it worked, and it really might work — you could help so many people? That’s the story of Amelia Zellander, PhD, a bioengineer who is developing synthetic corneas at a lab in West Philadelphia.
Groundbreaking transplants — faces, hands, livers, pig hearts — often capture headlines, but we rarely hear about cornea transplants. Yet replacing the eye’s cornea — keratoplasty — is the most frequent type of transplant in the US: 51,000 of them took place in 2024. Every 10 minutes, someone receives a donor cornea.
[Editor’s note: Amelia Zellander is a nominee for The Philadelphia Citizen’s “Rad Scientist of the Year.” On July 30, 2025, The Citizen will present the Rad Awards, celebrating dozens of outstanding Philadelphia women and their allies. Find out more information, and get your tickets.]
Unlike kidneys or livers, there are plenty of donor corneas available in the U.S. That’s because almost anyone can donate them when they die; there are few matching requirements, and the U.S. operates an extensive network of donor programs and tissue banks. There are so many corneas in the U.S. that last year, American eye banks exported nearly 27,000 to other countries.
Unfortunately, that’s where the good news stops. Patients’ bodies frequently reject human tissue implants. One study showed that 66 percent of donor corneas transplanted after an eye injury failed within ten years. The longer the transplant is in place, the greater the chance of rejection. Just as problematic, immunosuppressive eye drops patients must use can cause blindness on their own from cataracts and glaucoma. Subsequent donor corneas are even more likely to fail.
There are artificial corneas on the market, but even the gold standard, Boston Keratoprosthesis (Boston KPro), is considered a last resort because of complications that can arise: infections, glaucoma, and scarring.
Zellander believes she is building a better cornea. For the past 15 years, she’s been working on a version that promises to greatly reduce rejection rates and other eye problems, while greatly increasing the implants’ availability to the rest of the world.
From student to researcher
Zellander started her journey in Memphis, Tennessee. During the week, she lived with immediate family in a middle-class, African American neighborhood in the city. During summers and on weekends she stayed with her grandmother and her extended family, a ten-minute bike ride away in rural Mississippi. There were gardens, cows, porches and lots of cousins, aunts, and uncles.
Today, she lives in Cherry Hill, NJ, with her husband and daughter. “Rural South Jersey doesn’t look too different from where I grew up,” she says.
Zellander was a diligent student who, by middle school, would tuck herself away to do homework. “They thought I was weird, but they accepted me,” she says of her family and friends. “I was always supported as a human.” In high school, while researching college majors, she became fascinated with artificial tissue engineering.
“I like to make things, and I gotta help people. I’ve always been a curious person. I always wanted to know how things work. You know how some people outgrow that? I never did.” — Amelia Zellander
Her study and support led to an offer from Penn, where she majored in biomedical science and bioengineering and joined the Navy ROTC to pay her way. After college, she ran a Navy weather station at Pearl Harbor and served as the gunnery officer on a frigate out of Everett, Washington. “I realized after I got there that I was one of only four women out of over 200 people,” she says, “The Navy had recently stopped barring women from working on frigates. It was weird, but it was fine.”
Next, she earned a master’s in science in biotechnology at Johns Hopkins, and a PhD in bioengineering at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her 2013 doctoral thesis was on … cornea replacements.
Michael Cho, PhD, now Chair of the Bioengineering Department at University of Texas at Arlington, was the Principal Investigator on Zellander’s thesis research. “In my 25 years of mentoring graduate students, I’ve rarely encountered someone as intellectually agile and persistently curious as Amelia,” he wrote in an email. “Her work on synthetic corneas reshaped the way our lab approached biomaterials design.”
Zellander returned to Philadelphia to work for a pharmaceutical company. Nine years later, she left that job to found her company, BioLattice Ophthalmics.
Seeing the future
BioLattice will make its corneas of medical-grade plastic with proprietary chemical coatings. Clinical trials, once the company gets to that point, will reveal how easy they are to implant and how well they are tolerated in people, but early animal studies are promising on both fronts.
What we do know is that the product offers the distinct potential for a long shelf life and requires no refrigeration — unlike donor corneas — making shipping and storage much, much easier and less expensive. Zellander envisions that BioLattice corneas could be manufactured by the millions for patients around the world. And the world needs them.
According to JAMA Ophthalmology, 12.7 million people globally are awaiting cornea transplants. Although not every patient is a candidate (some patients require only a layer of the cornea, while BioLattice is developing full-thickness corneas), it’s clear that millions of people stand to benefit. Right now, only one cornea is available for every 70 patients worldwide.
Because of the ample quantity of cornea tissue in the U.S., many U.S. eye surgeons see no need for artificial corneas. Zellander credits her co-founder and COO Linda Alunkal for suspecting patients might feel differently.
Alunkal was right — in speaking to dozens of patients, they learned that many who receive donated corneas, while grateful for their second chance at sight, worry constantly that rejection will cause them to lose their vision again.
If the clinical trial is successful, BioLattice will submit its animal studies and human clinical trial data and a manufacturing plan to the FDA. If all goes well, the corneas will be available for sale in 2028, later globally. It could be a major breakthrough.
So, Zellander and her team of two have kept at it. She works out of B+labs, a sleek biotech incubator in the glassy Cira Centre tower next to 30th Street Station. She’s already developed a prototype of the artificial cornea and achieved a crucial “proof of concept” based on small-scale animal research.
The implantation surgery works just like it does with donor corneas: A surgeon removes the damaged cornea and sutures a new one into position. BioLattice’s studies find their corneas have been well tolerated.
The company has raised about $1 million so far, including a pivotal 2023 grant from the National Science Foundation that allowed them to kick off development of the prototype. Zellander holds a provisional U.S. patent for the technology.
Her next step: Raise $2 million more in seed funding to do further testing and apply for permission from the Food and Drug Administration to do a controlled clinical trial in people. If the clinical trial is successful, BioLattice will submit its animal studies and human clinical trial data and a manufacturing plan to the FDA. If all goes well, the corneas will be available for sale in 2028, later globally. It could be a major breakthrough.
The women behind the woman
Crucial early funding connections came from Tanya T. Morris of Mom Your Business, a nonprofit that helps Black and Brown women founders grow their businesses through access to strategic resources, technical assistance and funding. (Morris is a nominee for Philadelphia Citizen Entrepreneur of the Year, and was named to The Citizen’s inaugural cohort of our Generation Change Philly program.)
“What Amelia is building with BioLattice is groundbreaking,” wrote Morris in an email. “Watching her growth has been an absolute joy.”
Zellander’s task is formidable. Startups with all-female co-founders raised just 2 percent of the capital invested in U.S. startups in 2024, while male-only teams received 78 percent of the money, according to Pitchbook. A McKinsey analysis showed only 1 percent of U.S. venture capital went to Black entrepreneurs in 2022.
Undaunted, Zellander is prepping her fundraising pitch for hundreds of potential funders. So far, the Pennsylvania Life Science Greenhouse Initiative awarded BioLattice a grant (amount undisclosed) for corneal R&D. She’s also applying for traditional research grants. Some relationships she’s been cultivating for a decade.
The paperwork, for a staff of three, is enormous. “I wanted to be a scientist to be a scientist!” she says. But relationship building and administrative work are critical for an early-stage bioscience company. Should BioLattice succeed, she may get her wish.
In the end, ”I like to make things, and I gotta help people,” she says. “I’ve always been a curious person. I always wanted to know how things work. You know how some people outgrow that? I never did.”
Corrections: Keratoplasty is the surgical replacement of the cornea. Growing up, Zellander lived with her brother. Her masters from Johns Hopkins is in science and biotechnology. BioLattice’s COO is Linda Alunkal.
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