VEGFA and injury: The injury biomarkers, such as corneal opacity, corneal ulceration, corneal thickening, increases in keratocyte numbers, inflammatory cell density, and blood vessel counts, and expression levels of VEGF, COX-2, and MMP, established in our earlier reported studies in the NM-induced ex vivo and in vivo acute corneal injury models could be translated into the SM-induced in vivo corneal injury model in the present study [39, 40, 43].