Congress talks show what a technique can do. Instruction courses show surgeons how to do it. The Saudi Society of Cornea, Cataract and Refractive Surgery (SSCRS) held its first congress in Jeddah in September. There, Prof. Farhad Hafezi, MD, PhD, FARVO, ELZA’s Chief Medical Officer, spent 25 September in the SSCRS instruction courses. This was in addition to the four podium talks already reported on this site.

Making donor ring segments easier to handle

The morning course, “CAIRS: Deep Dive into the Secrets”, looked at corneal allogenic intrastromal ring segments (CAIRS). These are arcs of donor corneal tissue placed inside the cornea to flatten the cone of keratoconus, the disease in which the cornea thins and bulges. Prof. Hafezi’s contribution was titled “ECO-CAIRS: A Sterile, Intraoperative Evolution of the Technique”.

ECO-CAIRS addresses a practical problem with CAIRS. Donor segments are soft, so they bend and are hard to push through a narrow tunnel in the cornea. In ECO-CAIRS, the surgeon cross-links each segment in the operating room before implantation, at 30 J/cm². The segment becomes firmer and easier to insert, and the treatment is also intended to reduce any microbial load on its surface.

SSCRS instruction courses on thin corneas and complications

In the afternoon, Prof. Hafezi gave two 12-minute talks in the course “Locking the Cornea: Stopping the Spiral in Keratoconus”. The first, “ELZA-sub400: Redefining the thin cornea challenge”, addressed corneas that are too thin for standard treatment. Conventional corneal cross-linking (CXL) usually requires a thickness of roughly 400 µm. The second talk covered how to prepare patients for CXL and how to manage complications.

ELZA-sub400 takes the opposite route to most thin-cornea protocols. Rather than swelling the cornea to fit a fixed treatment, it adjusts the ultraviolet dose to the measured thickness of each cornea.

A conversation about careers

Between the two courses, Prof. Hafezi joined a fireside discussion titled “How to (not) plan your career”, with no slides and no formal talks. He answered questions on his own route through research and innovation, alongside Dr. Dawood Yaseen, who spoke on leadership, and Dr. Ali Al-Khairi, who spoke on entrepreneurship.

The closing day

On 26 September, Nikki Hafezi, CEO of the ELZA Institute and EMAGine AG, presented on corneal biomechanics as an early indicator of keratoconus from the congress main hall. Prof. Hafezi later called SSCRS 2026 “a fantastic conference”, adding that he had enjoyed teaching and learning from his peers.

For a new society, the SSCRS instruction courses were a statement of intent: a meeting built to pass on technique, not only results. ECO-CAIRS and ELZA-sub400 are performed at the ELZA Institute.