A leading Edinburgh eye surgeon has issued a call for Scotland to establish its own dedicated eye bank facility.
Dr Naing Tint’s comments come on World Sight Day (8 October), with him stating that a dedicated Scottish facility would allow the country to independently recover, prepare, and deliver donated eyes for cornea transplants without relying on facilities located south of the border.
Scotland currently lacks its own operational eye bank and instead heavily depends on the NHS eye bank network located in Liverpool and Bristol to process and distribute vital ocular tissues.
Dr Tint argued that launching a domestic eye bank would significantly extend the capabilities of the country’s existing tissue labs and function as a crucial hub for medical research and innovation.
Under the current system, when a deceased person’s family in Scotland agrees to organ donation, the donor cornea must be retrieved within a strict 24-hour window and immediately preserved.
The delicate tissue is subsequently transported hundreds of miles to an eye bank in England, where it undergoes complex processing and can then be safely stored for a period of up to four weeks.
Whenever a Scottish ophthalmic surgeon requires tissue for a local patient undergoing a transplant operation, they must submit a formal request to have the processed cornea securely shipped back up north.
“We make a request and we get allocated the tissue, which gets shipped for us to use on our patients,” says Dr Tint.
While this existing supply system generally functions efficiently for patients in need of standard transplants, medical professionals have noted that it leaves Scotland without a local, operational base for the essential research and development that eye banks typically support.
Dr Tint, who maintains practices in both Edinburgh and Glasgow, has previously completed several complex surgical firsts in Scotland, including pioneering DMEK corneal transplants and DSO procedures for Fuchs dystrophy.
The experienced surgeon views the potential for local, ground-breaking research and development as the primary benefit of establishing a domestic facility.
“We do have good tissue labs already in Edinburgh, and this would be an extension of that, whereby we’re able to process our own tissue and give us a degree of ownership.”
According to the surgical specialist, an eye bank represents significantly more than just a logistical supply chain for medical materials.
“An eye bank is not just providing tissue for transplantation. It is a hub for potential research and development in coming up with new techniques, preparation techniques, different ways of doing things,” says Dr Tint.
Historically, international eye banks have played a pivotal role in driving major medical advances and developing new clinical treatments for visually impaired patients.
Researchers stationed at the Bristol facility previously developed revolutionary techniques to extend the safe storage time of donor corneas from just four days to four weeks, successfully transforming emergency transplantations into scheduled, routinely planned operations.
More recently, the scientific study of donor corneas has facilitated a major medical breakthrough in Japan, where an innovative cell therapy treatment officially approved in 2023 allows medical staff to use a single donated cornea to treat more than 100 individual eyes.
Similarly, the US-based eye bank network Eversight is currently actively developing its own therapeutic breakthroughs in direct collaboration with a commercial biotechnology partner.
With functional laboratory infrastructure already firmly established across the nation, Dr Tint maintains that transitioning to a fully dedicated eye bank would finally give Scotland full ownership over the next generation of ocular transplant therapies.
