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Article History

Received: 12 April 2025

Accepted: 10 July 2025

First Online: 20 October 2025

Acknowledgements

: We thank the National Disease Research Interchange (NDRI, Philadelphia, PA, USA) and the Center for Vision and Eye Banking Research, Eversight (Cleveland, OH, USA) for providing us with human corneas from deceased donors. General research support was provided to Eversight by the Connecticut Lions Eye Research Foundation, the Lowell F. Johnson Foundation, the Eppley Foundation for Research, the William G. and Helen C. Hoffman Foundation and the Louise H. and David S. Ingalls Foundation. We would like to acknowledge the Cedars-Sinai Proteomics and Metabolomics Core facilities for the acquisition and analysis of proteomic data. We are grateful for the support of the Genomics Core facility at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center for performing RNA-seq analysis. This work was presented as a poster at the 2025 Cornea and Ocular Surface Biology, Pathology and Regeneration GRC, 16–21 February 2025, Ventura, CA.

: All results of this study are included in the manuscript and ESM. Data and resources are available upon request from the corresponding author. The RNA-seq dataset is available from the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) using the accession number GSE292721, and the proteomics data are available on MassIVE (ID: MSV000097328).

: Open access funding provided by SCELC, Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium. This work was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, R01 EY025377 (MS); R01EY029829 (MS); R01EY031377 (AVL); R01EY013431 (AVL); the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM EDUC4-12751) (DZ); and funding from the Board of Governors Regenerative Medicine Institute (MS).

: The authors declare that there are no relationships or activities that might bias, or be perceived to bias, their work.

: DZ contributed to design and methodology, supervision, investigation and analyses, and writing, reviewing, editing and approving the manuscript. JG, SME, YW, NV, AJP and SW contributed to design and methodology, investigation and analysis, and reviewing, editing and approving the manuscript. RS, AAK, OBS, CS and ABS contributed to design and methodology, data collection and reviewing, editing and approving the manuscript. ZPW and JEVE contributed to conceptualisation, design and methodology, and reviewing, editing and approving the manuscript. AVL contributed to conceptualisation, design and methodology, supervision, funding acquisition, project administration, investigation and reviewing, editing and approving the manuscript. MS contributed to conceptualisation, design and methodology, supervision, investigation and analyses, funding acquisition, project administration and writing, reviewing, editing and approving the manuscript. MS is the guarantor of this work.