Nowadays regenerative medicine has attracted many attentions among researchers for investigating new methods to treat ocular surface diseases. Based on this new concept, cultured limbal epithelial transplantation (CLET) was introduced as a promising surgical procedure for treating patients with limbal stem cell deficiency (LSCD). In this study, we summarized and meta-analyzed the efficacy of two different CLET techniques from related studies.

In order to obtain important outcomes, searching electronic databases including PUBMED, GOOGLE SCHOLAR and SCOPUS for related articles was done in December 2016 and meta-analysis was performed according to success rate in ocular surface regeneration and 2-line improvement in visual acuity (VA) between autografts and allografts.

A total of 33 studies including 1142 eyes from 1304 patients with LSCD were included with a range of population from 3 to 166 and the follow up period of 12 days to 121 months. The minimum follow up of 6 months was considered for this study. Out of 1142 eyes, 1130 (98.94%) were autografts and 178 (15.6%) were allografts from living or deceased donors. The Meta analysis showed that the pooled odds of 2 lines VA improvement was 1.2 (95% CI: 0.59 to 2.45) times in autografts compared to allografts. Also, the success rate in autografts was 1.93 (95% CI: 0.91 to 4.13) times higher than the allografts, which was statistically nonsignificant.

CLET is a useful therapeutic modality for curing patients with LSCD. In our analysis, there was no difference in success rates and visual improvements observed between autograft and allograft surgical techniques.