Model Katie Piper
Model Katie Piper, victim of an acid attack gets sight back Reuters

It is a new dawn for Katie Piper!

The former model and television presenter, who was left partially blind in one eye, after an acid attack, has had her sight restored following stem-cell surgery.

The 28-year-old suffered third degree burns when ex-boyfriend Daniel Lynch, 35, arranged for Stefan Sylvestre, 22, to throw acid in her face in 2008. After the incident she lost sight in one eye... until doctors from the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead intervened.

"It wasn't like I took the bandage off and my sight came back like that, it happened gradually," she was quoted as saying in the Mirror.

"But after three weeks I started to see results. I'd seen a lot of progress with my scars, but my sight was the one injury I'd say to myself was permanent and least expected to change," she added.

An eye tissue from the cornea of an anonymous male donor was used for it. The cells then grew and three weeks later were stitched into Piper's damaged eye. Eventually, her eye was covered with amniotic membrane - womb lining donated by women who have had caesarean births which acted as a bandage.

"We had these cells manufactured by the eye bank in East Grinstead and we transplanted them onto Katie's eye," Sheraz Daya, the specialist who treated Piper was quoted as saying, in a BBC report.

"The fascinating thing about all this is while we're taking tissue from somebody who died, in the long term, what we have found is that there's no DNA from that individual," the doctor added, "So we expect, in Katie's case, all the cells that we've transplanted to be dissolved and for them to be replaced with Katie's tissue."

Incidentally, Piper had to undergo nearly 100 individual operations, to treat the damage of the attack.