Occasional dry eyes are one thing, but when you’re dealing with chronic dryness or corneal damage, it’s nothing to brush off. Chronic dry eyes and corneal damage can cause irritation, sensitivity to light, blurred vision, or an injury that won’t heal.
When the surface of your eye is inflamed or compromised, standard treatments may not be enough. In these cases, your eye needs more than symptom relief. Your cornea needs help repairing and restoring itself.
Enter: Prokera®.
Prokera is an FDA-cleared corneal bandage that helps your eyes heal from surface damage. Instead of just managing symptoms, this treatment works to calm eye inflammation and promote healing, so you can get back to feeling comfortable and seeing clearly again.
Take a moment as the Bainbridge Eye Care team in Bronx, New York, explains how Prokera works and the seven problems it can help resolve.
Prokera is a regenerative treatment that utilizes amniotic membrane tissue to help heal the surface of your eye. The amniotic membrane tissue is preserved through the proprietary CryoTek® process and retains natural healing components, including specific proteins that reduce inflammation and support tissue regeneration.
Dr. Lacsina or Dr. Pinkhasova places it gently on the surface of your eye, similar to a contact lens. You can think of ProKera as a biological healing bandage for your eye.
After they place the membrane on your eye, your eyelid may be lightly secured (called a tape tarsorrhaphy) to keep the device in place.
Over the next 3 to 7 days, the membrane works continuously to:
While it’s in place, your eye actively repairs itself, often more effectively than it can on its own. At your follow-up visit, Dr. Lacsina or Dr. Pinkhasova removes the device and evaluates your progress.
Now that we’ve covered how it works, let’s talk about when you might consider Prokera. Because it addresses both healing and inflammation, Prokera can be especially helpful for conditions that don’t respond well to traditional treatments, including:
Left untreated, chronic dryness can lead to corneal abrasions. That’s why it’s important to find the treatment that works for you.
Our team offers several treatments for dry eye syndrome, including medicated eye drops, such as Restasis®, Xiidra®, and Cequa™, and punctual plugs.
In severe cases, the drops and punctual plugs aren’t enough. If you have moderate to severe dry eye that doesn’t improve with drops, Prokera can help restore the surface of your eye and reduce inflammation.
Reducing scarring is important because it can interfere with how light enters your eye and impact vision.
Prokera may help improve healing in eyes affected by corneal scarring because the amniotic membrane helps support tissue repair.
Keratitis refers to the painful inflammation of your cornea. Prokera can help reduce inflammation and promote healing in certain types of keratitis, including bacterial keratitis.
In this condition, the cells responsible for maintaining the surface of your eye (limbal stem cells) are damaged or depleted. Prokera helps support cellular regeneration, which can improve your eye’s ability to heal itself.
When the surface of your eye doesn’t heal properly, Prokera can promote tissue regeneration and help correct these defects. When you correct these defects, it helps reduce your risk of infection and further complications.
For more serious conditions, like corneal ulcers, Prokera helps protect the eye while supporting healing and reducing inflammation. In fact, studies show that using cryopreserved amniotic membrane can help your eye heal faster, with many people seeing quicker recovery than with standard treatment alone (3.5 weeks versus 5.8 weeks).
In cases of chemical injury, Prokera acts as a protective barrier while helping the eye heal and recover from the burn. This protection can reduce the risk of scarring and long-term cornea damage.
Dr. Nicanor Lacsina and Dr. Yelena Pinkhasova have undergone training to place Prokera corneal bandages. They can place Prokera in your eye during an in-office visit right here in the Bronx, New York City.
The bandage sits on the surface of your eye like a contact lens and remains in place for several days while it works.
You may feel mild discomfort or awareness of the device at first, but most people tolerate it well.
Questions? Schedule an appointment with Bainbridge Eye Care today to determine if ProKera is right for you and start seeing relief. You can also call us at 718-306-9127.
