A scalable corneal xenograft platform: simultaneous opportunities for tissue engineering and circular economic sustainability by repurposing slaughterhouse waste

High-throughput platforms that can generate substantial quantities of corneal grafts will be invaluable in addressing the existing global demand for keratoplasty. Slaughterhouses generate substantial quantities of underutilized biological waste that can be repurposed to reduce current environmentally unfriendly practices. Such efforts to support sustainability can simultaneously drive the development of transplantable ovine corneas and patient-specific bioartificial keratoprostheses. This study presents a dataset highlighting techniques that evaluated the development of a simplified, inexpensive, and high-throughput corneal xenograft platform. To our knowledge, this is the first dataset to be generated in the United Arab Emirates, outlining a platform that can produce dozens of native ovine xenografts and acellular corneal scaffolds that effectively preserve ocular transparency, transmittance and ECM components. Such native grafts can then be genetically modified to reduce rejection and retrovirus transmission in recipients. Analogously, decellularization technologies can support corneal regeneration with attributes comparable to native xenografts.