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Lions keep the focus on vision problems

One of the country's most active eye banks will move into a former cigar factory in Ybor City.

By JANET ZINK
Published February 25, 2005

For most of Shirley Crane's life, her vision was fine.

When she turned 65, it began to deteriorate.

By 2002, she couldn't drive and needed a magnifying glass to read. A hereditary corneal disease called Fuch's dystrophy had stolen her vision.

Then, in May 2003, surgeons replaced her right cornea. They replaced her left cornea in late 2004.

Now, the 70-year-old St. Petersburg resident can drive and read without glasses. A few weeks ago, she began working part-time as a secretary at St. Petersburg College.

"I can do anything," Crane said. "I am extremely happy. A person does not really know what it's like until they do not have good sight anymore."

Both of Crane's new corneas came from the Central Florida Lions Eye and Tissue Bank in Tampa, one of the country's most active eye banks.

The bank will move this summer from a 10,000-square-foot facility in the West Shore business district to a 30,000-square-foot former cigar factory in Ybor City. The Lions bought the building at Fourth Avenue and 21st Street for $2.5-million in January and plan to begin a $500,000 renovation next month.

"This move into a new facility exemplifies the growth and stature this eye bank has both locally and nationally," said ophthalmologist Lewis Groden, medical director of the eye bank.

The extra space will allow the bank, which will change its name to the Lions Eye Institute for Transplant and Research, to reach more patients and share its eye-banking expertise with people around the world, said Jason Woody, the bank's executive director.

The Central Florida Lions Eye and Tissue Bank was established in 1973 by members of the local chapter of the Lions Club, a national service organization that directs many of its efforts to issues relating to blindness. The Central Florida eye bank works with more than 120 hospitals in Florida.

When a patient dies at one of the hospitals, representatives from the eye bank contact family members about donations and collect tissue from people who have indicated they want to be eye donors. They test the tissue for diseases such as HIV and hepatitis and, if it's healthy, send it to wherever it's needed - either in Florida or elsewhere.

Last year, the Central Florida eye bank collected more than 6,000 eyes. About 2,500 were transplanted. The rest were either discarded because they were defective or used for research on glaucoma, macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy and other diseases that cause blindness.

"We want to help people who need a cornea transplant now," Woody said. "We also want to help prevent eye disease in the future."

Corneal transplants have been available since the 1940s, and eye banking took off in the 1970s.

Corneal transplants are among the most successful of all transplants, with 98 percent of them effective, said James Rowsey, an ophthalmologist at St. Luke's Cataract and Laser Institute in Tarpon Springs, where Crane received her transplant.

They work well because doctors can put immunosuppressants right on the tissue to keep the body from rejecting it. With other organ transplants, such as livers and hearts, the drugs have to be administered internally.

The transplants don't use the entire eyeball, just the cornea, Rowsey said. Harvested tissue can be preserved for about a week.

In the United States, the number of corneal transplants done each year has held steady at about 40,000 for the past decade, Rowsey said.

People don't have a long wait to receive the tissue, like they do for livers.

"In the United States we have a sufficient supply to meet the need," said Patricia Aiken-O'Neill, president and chief executive officer of the Eye Bank Association of America in Washington, D.C. "There's a public health crisis in the rest of the world."

The Central Florida Lions Eye Bank in Tampa hopes to help address that problem at its new facility by hiring 12 more technicians, educators and other employees, bringing the total work force to 50.

About 6,000 square feet of the institute will be dedicated to training. In recent years, the Tampa eye bank has taught people from India, China, Cuba and Armenia how to run a successful facility.

"What we would like to do is not only provide tissue to get the ball rolling in these countries but also teach them how to develop eye banks so they can be self-sufficient," Woody said.

Still, even in the United States, eye banks face challenges.

The popularity of Lasik surgery, which corrects vision but changes the shape of the cornea, and the emergence of new diseases, such as West Nile virus, mean fewer people are eligible as transplant donors.

"The eye banks have to keep their efforts at a high pitch in order to continue to meet the need," Aiken-O'Neill said.

Woody said the new Lions Eye Institute for Transplant and Research means the facility will be able to keep up its pace.

"All facets of our program are going to change when we move there," he said. "It's going to be monumental for the Lions."

Janet Zink can be reached at 226-3401 or jzink@sptimes.com

[Last modified February 24, 2005, 09:35:09]