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Corneal refractive surgery, as one of the common visual correction methods, has been increasingly accepted in China. There are a large number of people in China who undergo the corneal refractive surgery due to the high incidence of myopia in the country. It is essential that the safest and most effective surgery should be used to correct refractive errors in the cases involved with relatively normal eyes and corneas. In recent years, corneal refractive surgery has been rapidly developing with new technologies and techniques emerging all the time, such as SMILE (small incision lenticule extraction) surgery, which has been extensively applied in China since five years ago when it was approved by FDA. However, little known are these new technologies and techniques, and the clinical and basic researches need further investigations by various approaches including histopathology and molecular biology, combined with mathematics, computer science, physics, chemistry and corneal biomechanics. To achieve minimal tissue damage and optimal clinical outcomes on visual quality by corneal refractive surgery requires the multidisciplinary partnerships of medical practitioners and researchers. (Chin J Ophthalmol, 2018, 54: 3-6) .

It is well known that corneal epithelial stem cells reside in the limbal basal layer. Recently, it has been found that oligopotent stem cells, located in the basal layer of corneal epithelium, can repair epithelial cell damage. Although corneal endothelial cells usually could not regenerate in vivo, stem cells have been detected in the endothelial cell layer and can convert into endothelial cells under certain circumstances. Stem cells are also present in corneal stroma. The heterogeneous stromal cells manifest features of neural crest progenitor cells in some situations, which make latent herpes simplex virus-1 infection possible. Moreover, the finding that the hyphal growth of different fungal pathogens shows different patterns in the cornea. This finding significantly promotes the surgical treatment of fungal keratitis. The major risk factor of acanthamoeba keratitis in China is trauma caused by plants or soil, which is different from developed countries, in which the major risk factor is contact lens wear. This finding provides important new information for clinical diagnosis of this disorder. Advances in basic and clinical corneal research in the last five years are reviewed in this article.