When the Doheny Eye Bank was chartered in 1947, it was one of the very first of its kind. Today, more than 100 banks supply the country with 40,000 corneas per year. The donated cornea is then transported to the eye bank to be evaluated for transparency. Tech-nicians review the tissue's medical history, then test it for all types of hepatitis, HIV, HTLV1 and syphilis. If it passes, the cornea is placed in a special refrigerated container that can maintain a temperature between 2 and 6 degrees centigrade while it is dispatched to an operating room anywhere in the United States.
Doctors try to match tissue to specific requirements.
For example, if the transplant will go to a child, they look for a young cornea. But the top priority is assuring the ongoing availability of healthy corneas. While heart, liver and other transplant candidates must wait on lists for organs to become available, tissue banking now assures that a surgeon can schedule corneal replacement surgery for any desired date with a reasonable expectation that a transplantable cornea will be there. The eye bank provides the tissue to Los Angeles County-operated hospitals and physicians who waive their fees in order to make corneal transplants available to anyone, regardless of income. Availability used to be even greater.