PAT IE N T C A R E
Utah Lions Eye Bank Celebrates 50 Years of Giving the Gift of Sight The Moran Eye Center’s nonprofit Utah Lions Eye Bank (ULEB) recently celebrated 50 years of working with eye tissue donors and their families to provide corneal tissue for sight-restoring transplants and eye disease research. Donor families, transplant recipients, and ophthalmologists gathered at the ULEB in September 2022 for a celebration featuring educational tours, food trucks, and games. “The celebration allowed us to extend our personal thanks to families of tissue donors who have provided hope to thousands of people and share our state-of-the-art facility and process,” says ULEB Director Chris Hanna. “Our coordinators work 24/7 to provide sensitive, timely service, so it was a great opportunity to give people an inside view of what we do.”
ULEB donors give the gift of sight in two ways:
Tissue donation for cornea transplants. This common and effective procedure restores vision for people with certain corneal diseases, such as keratoconus, or damage to the cornea from injury or infection.
Tissue donation of healthy and diseased eyes for research. ULEB supplies eye tissue to world-class researchers developing innovative treatments for various blinding eye diseases, such as age-related macular degeneration (AMD). Research on human tissue allows scientists—including those developing AMD therapies at Moran’s Sharon Eccles Steele Center for Translational Medicine (SCTM)—to investigate disease progression, genetics, and potential new therapies. The ULEB serves Utah and Idaho as well as patients domestically and internationally. Since Lions Clubs International members founded the ULEB in 1972, it has provided more than 20,000 grafts of corneal tissue to restore vision.
A GR AT EF UL PAT IEN T HONOR S HER P H YSICI A N By the time Janice Evans met Moran’s Mark Mifflin, MD, in 2013, she had a long history of eye problems. Doctors diagnosed Evans with keratoconus, a potentially blinding corneal disease, at age 11. Now 70, she has had four cornea transplants (three of them in her right eye). Keratoconus affects one in every 2,000 Americans and is the most common reason for a cornea transplant. The disease causes the cornea, the clear, dome-shaped window in front of the eye, to slowly thin and develop a cone shape over time. Because the cornea focuses light into the eye, the condition causes light rays to go out of focus, blurring and distorting vision. It makes daily activities, such as reading or driving, difficult.
Chris Hanna is director of the ULEB.
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“Keratoconus requires patients to be adaptive and resilient,” explains Mifflin. “It often starts in the late teens or early 20s, but symptoms slowly progress over 10 to 20 years. We can often correct a patient’s vision with glasses or special contact lenses, and the cornea will stabilize. Still, in about 10% to 20% of people, the cornea will eventually become too scarred or will not tolerate a contact lens. If either of these problems occur, we may need to do a transplant.”