Publications by authors named "Yoke F Chiew"
With the expected rise in patients undergoing refractive lenticule extraction worldwide, the number of discarded corneal stromal lenticules will increase. Therefore, establishing a lenticule bank to collect, catalog, process, cryopreserve, and distribute the lenticules (for future therapeutic needs) could be advantageous. In this study, we validated the safety of lenticule banking that involved the collection of human lenticules from our eye clinic, transportation of the lenticules to a Singapore Ministry of Health-licensed lenticule bank, processing, and cryopreservation of the lenticules, which, after 3 months or, a longer term, 12 months, were retrieved and transported to our laboratory for implantation in rabbit corneas.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Wharton's Jelly (WJ) is an established source of mesenchymal stem cells (MSC). We compared 3 methods of extracting WJ-MSC from cryopreserved tissue and determined that enzymatic digestion of the WJ yielded the most viable MSC, compared to the explant and mechanical digestion methods. The enzymatically-released WJ-MSC conformed to the International Society for Cellular Therapy (ISCT) criteria: displayed plastic-adherence, co-expressed CD73, CD90, CD105 and were negative for hematopoietic lineage cell markers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground And Objective: Streptococcus pneumoniae is an important cause of morbidity and mortality in both the paediatric and adult population. This study aimed to define pneumococcal colonization rates, and antibiotic resistance patterns across two periods a decade apart, and also assess the serotypes of colonizing strains in children in the era of early pneumococcal conjugate vaccine uptake in Singapore.
Methods: Two cross-sectional prevalence surveys were carried out in 1997 and 2007-2008 on children attending day-care centres across Singapore.