Top Edinburgh eye surgeon calls for Scotland to have its own eye bank
World Sight Day on 8 October, a campaign led by the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness (IAPB), calls on governments around the world to prioritise eye care and provide funding so people can access the care they need.
Ahead of World Sight Day, Edinburgh eye surgeon Dr Naing Tint has called for Scotland to have its own eye bank, a facility that recovers, prepares and delivers donated eyes for cornea transplants and research. He said this would extend the country's existing tissue labs and become a hub for research and innovation.
Scotland currently has no eye bank of its own. Instead, it relies on the NHS eye banks in Liverpool and Bristol, part of a national system that issues thousands of corneas for transplant across the UK every year.
Currently, when someone dies in Scotland and their family agrees to donate, the cornea must be retrieved within 24 hours and preserved. It is then sent to an eye bank in England, where it is processed and can be stored for up to four weeks.
When a Scottish surgeon needs tissue for a patient, it runs the other way: "We make a request and we get allocated the tissue, which gets shipped for us to use on our patients," explained Dr Tint.
Dr Tint's surgical firsts in Scotland include DMEK corneal transplants (a highly advanced form of corneal transplant that replaces only the damaged inner layer of the cornea, a layer thinner than a human hair, typically giving patients faster recovery and sharper vision than a traditional transplant) and DSO ( a treatment that removes a small disc of diseased tissue from the inner layer of the cornea and lets the patient's own healthy cells grow back over it, so no donor cornea is needed), for Fuchs dystrophy.
Scotland has no local base for the research and development that eye banks can support.
Dr Tint said: "We do have good tissue labs already in Edinburgh, and an eye bank would be an extension of that, whereby we'd be able to process our own tissue and have a degree of ownership."
An eye bank, he argued, is about more than supply. "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 and different ways of doing things.”
He reported that eye banks have driven advances before, with Bristol's having made corneas last four weeks instead of four days. He also noted that donor corneas are behind a breakthrough in Japan, where a cell therapy approved in 2023 can turn one cornea into treatment for more than 100 eyes.
Dr Tint is one of Scotland's leading eye surgeons, specialising in cataract, lens and refractive surgery. He trained at the world-renowned Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, where he later worked as a consultant. He is an NHS consultant at the Princess Alexandra Eye Pavilion in Edinburgh, and also practises privately in Edinburgh and Glasgow.
Pictured: Dr Tint
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