Boris Stanzel

About Boris Stanzel

Boris Stanzel

Consultant Retina Specialist and Director, Macula Centre Saar, Knappschaft Eye Hospital; Group Leader, Clinical Stem Cell Technology, Fraunhofer Institute for Biomedical Technology, Saarbrücken-Sulzbach; Lecturer, University of Bonn, Germany; Scientific Consultant, NEI, Bethesda, MD, USA; Hong Leong Visiting Associate Professor in Ophthalmology at the National University of Singapore.

Boris is a vitreoretinal surgeon and clinician-scientist who gained international renown for his transplantation of retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) into the subretinal space of rabbits – a first in a large-eyed animal model, followed closely by successful transplantation into pigs. Recently, he and his colleagues at SNEC, the Singapore Eye Research Institute, the NEI and Tampere University, Finland, have successfully created a non-human primate model platform, guided by intraoperative OCT, for stem cell-based RPE replacement therapy evaluation – bringing this modality a step closer to clinical use, and this work has led to several awards and several ongoing collaborations with leading researchers, including Heli Skottman in Finland and Kapil Bharti at the US. His team in Sulzbach initiated the SuGAR-AMD study in preparation for a cell therapy clinical trial for the treatment of AMD in Germany.

Intrepid Ophthalmology: Replacing the RPE with Cells on a Scaffold