---
title: "Utah Engineers Get $2.4 Million to Test Whether a Cornea’s Shape Makes Keratoconus Worse"
description: "A National Eye Institute grant funds a chip whose curvature is adjustable, to test whether keratoconus eventually runs on its own momentum"
author: "Nate Ledger"
published: 2026-11-06T15:03:38.865Z
modified: 2026-11-06T15:46:25Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/utah-engineers-get-2-4-million-to-test-whether-a-cornea-s-sh-bea80f
language: en
tags: ["biotech", "health", "cornea", "keratoconus", "chips", "science"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Utah Engineers Get $2.4 Million to Test Whether a Cornea’s Shape Makes Keratoconus Worse

*A National Eye Institute grant funds a chip whose curvature is adjustable, to test whether keratoconus eventually runs on its own momentum*

By Nate Ledger · November 6, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/utah-engineers-get-2-4-million-to-test-whether-a-cornea-s-sh-bea80f

## In brief

- The National Eye Institute gave University of Utah engineer Jay Kim a four-year, $2.4 million grant to study keratoconus
- Kim’s hypothesis is that the cornea’s cone shape drives a self-reinforcing loop of stress, cell damage, thinning and more bulging
- His lab’s cornea-on-a-chip uses hydraulic pressure to curve a membrane of living human corneal cells to disease-like shapes
- A 2025 Nature Communications paper found curvature alone pushed healthy corneal cells toward a scar-forming, inflammatory state
- The chip counts as a ‘New Approach Methodology’, a type of non-animal model the FDA is encouraging under its 2025 roadmap

Keratoconus is a disease in which the cornea, the clear dome at the front of the eye, gets thinner and bulges outward into a cone. It starts as a small protrusion. It can keep steepening until vision blurs past the point that glasses, or the treatments meant to slow the damage, can correct. Not much is known about why it progresses. Up to one in five patients eventually need a cornea transplant, which puts keratoconus among the leading reasons for that surgery worldwide.

The University of Utah [announced this week](https://attheu.utah.edu/science-technology/cornea-on-a-chip-offers-new-way-to-study-a-blinding-eye-disease/) that the National Eye Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, has given Jungkyu “Jay” Kim, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, a four-year, $2.4 million grant. That works out to about $600,000 a year. The money is for testing a hypothesis that, if it holds up, would be the first detailed explanation of how the disease progresses. Here is Kim, who also has appointments in biomedical engineering and at the university’s John A. Moran Eye Center:

> We think the new shape becomes the problem. The cone shape creates stress, the stress damages cells, the damage thins the tissue, and thinner tissue bulges more. Each turn makes the next one worse. At some point the disease stops needing its original cause.

I think that last sentence is the interesting one. If you work in finance you will recognise the shape. In a margin spiral, falling prices trigger margin calls, margin calls force selling, and the selling pushes prices down further. Eventually nobody remembers what started the decline, and it stops mattering, because the decline is now funding itself. Kim is proposing that keratoconus works the same way, except the asset is your cornea and the margin call is mechanical stress. If he’s right, the practical upshot is that hunting for the original cause may not help a patient whose cornea is already deep into the loop. What would help is finding the part of the loop you can cut.

![A textured illustration shows a blue eyeball wrapped in looping red ribbons against a pale cream background.](https://rews.cc/img/e4796aec50af39f9a1d89388535e4fbf6c21e4d8.webp)

The hard part is proving it. “There’s no animal model that truly reproduces keratoconus,” Kim said. “And you can’t take a donated cornea, reshape it, and see how the cells respond over time.”

So his lab built its own. The cornea-on-a-chip is a small transparent device that holds living human corneal cells on a thin membrane. Hydraulic pressure can curve the membrane on demand, anywhere from the gentle dome of a healthy eye to the steep shapes seen in keratoconus. Curvature becomes a dial the researchers can turn, and it now works across all three of the cornea’s cell layers in a single chip.

## Shape alone

The group has already turned the dial once. In a [paper in *Nature Communications*](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-64889-8) published in November 2025, Kim and his co-authors Minju Kim, Kanghoon Choi and David Krizaj reported something unexpected. Curvature by itself, with no chemical trigger and no injury, was enough to push healthy corneal cells toward a fibrotic, scar-forming state and switch on inflammatory genes. The paper says different cell types reacted differently. Keratocytes lost their normal self-regulation, fibroblasts laid down more matrix, and myofibroblasts broke matrix down. The authors concluded that cells sensing and responding to curvature is a fundamental driver of corneal disease. When the result came out, the university’s [earlier announcement](https://www.mech.utah.edu/cornea-on-a-chip-device-points-to-potential-new-treatments-for-eye-disease/) put the number of people worldwide with keratoconus and similar shape-related eye diseases at about 1 in 350.

![A textured illustration shows a pink mountain-like mound inside a wavy-edged basin on a transparent rectangular platform, with a tube entering from the left.](https://rews.cc/img/ccb827a34ccf98a9e81c54e5bd177c5ad88ece7a.webp)

“That was the moment this became more than just an engineering project,” Kim said.

The new grant asks two linked questions. The first is about mechanism. At what curvature does ordinary mechanical stress turn into damage? How does that damage spread between the cornea’s layers? Is there a point where the cycle can be broken? The second is about treatment. Once the lab knows which molecular pathways carry the damage, it can put drugs designed to block those pathways onto the chip, both before the cornea steepens and after the damage has started.

“Knowing the mechanism isn’t the finish line,” Kim said. “A drug that works before the disease takes hold and a drug that works after are different problems, and patients see ophthalmologists at every stage.”

The work involves two departments in the Price College of Engineering plus the Moran Eye Center. Jiyoung Chang, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, makes the ultrathin membranes that stand in for the cornea’s internal layers. Michael Yu, a professor of biomedical engineering, analyses collagen damage and the proteins that change under mechanical stress. Amy Lin, a cornea surgeon at Moran, will supply corneal tissue from keratoconus patients having transplants, along with data on that tissue’s curvature and thickness. So the patients the disease pushes into surgery become the check on the model.

![Gloved hands use tweezers and a magnifying glass to examine pink fibrous samples in and beside a petri dish.](https://rews.cc/img/a3c667e77d7792d5c1ad4011194230400024e1d5.webp)

## A category with a name

There is also a regulatory side to this. Regulators call devices like the chip “New Approach Methodologies”: lab models built from human cells that are meant to answer questions that currently need animal studies. Federal interest has grown under the FDA Modernization Act. According to a [review in the scientific literature](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10617761/), the 2.0 version, signed in December 2022, made clear that non-animal methods such as organs-on-chips can support an application to begin human drug trials. Note that it permits them. It doesn’t require them. In April 2025 the FDA went further and published a [roadmap to reducing animal testing](https://www.fda.gov/files/newsroom/published/roadmap_to_reducing_animal_testing_in_preclinical_safety_studies.pdf) in preclinical safety studies, which names organ-on-a-chip systems among the validated methods it wants to rely on. [RAPS reported](https://www.raps.org/resource/fda-drafts-guidance-on-animal-testing-alternatives.html) that draft guidance on these methods followed.

That matters for incentives. A biology lab with a clever device is a nice story. A biology lab with a clever device that fits a category regulators have named, and say they want more of, has an obvious route to drug developers who need data the FDA will accept. Eye research suits this well, because animal eyes differ from human eyes in many ways.

“Every one of these chips is a question we can answer without an animal,” Kim said. “In eye research that matters more than most, because for a lot of what we need to know, there isn’t a good animal model to begin with.”

The lab also has a separate project abroad. An award from the Korea Health Industry Development Institute funds a collaboration with Asan Medical Center in Seoul on how corneal nerves grow back after transplant surgery. Many patients are left with reduced feeling in the eye after the operation, and the reasons are still poorly understood.

So one grant studies how corneas get bad enough to need a transplant, and the other studies what goes wrong after the transplant. That covers both ends of the problem, with the operation in between.