Looking Back and Looking Forward

The Rocky Mountain Lions Eye Bank has come a long way in its decades of service. As we celebrate 40 years of connecting donors’ gifts of sight to recipients to help them overcome blindness, it's a time to look back at where we’ve been and look forward to where we’re going.

We started back in 1982, founded as a joint effort by the Lions of Colorado and Wyoming. Dr. Marc Whitaker performed our first recovery four days after our founding on August 11. Since then we've pursued our mission to fulfill the wishes of eye donors and their families to help another overcome blindness through transplantation and research.

In our first three decades we became one of the top 10 eye banks in the U.S., expanded to serve international recipients and moved to our current location.

The Past 10 Years at RMLEB

“More has happened in the last 10 years than in the first 30,” said John Lohmeier, executive director of the eye bank. John has seen the changes at RMLEB firsthand, having started with us as a recovery technician 23 years ago. Though plenty has changed in the past 10 years, a few changes have had an outsized impact on the organization.

“When I first started, we would be waiting days and days to get paper charting from the hospitals,” explained Staci Terrin, technical manager. She started at RMLEB as a recovery technician eight years ago. 

The shift to electronic documentation has made the whole process much smoother and shorter. Time is the biggest enemy to the viability of eye tissue for transplant. Anything that speeds up the process means more, better-quality tissues for surgeons and recipients.

Another change from the past 10 years was the addition of the Lion Jack and Christine Nisselius Eye Bank Annex in April 2015, named in recognition of the couple’s generous financial contributions over the years.

Located a few miles from our office, the Annex serves as a recovery and processing facility. It is one of the most advanced eye bank processing facilities in the nation, and its dedicated recovery space allows us to perform donor recoveries that we aren’t able to perform at other locations. 

New Processes Mean New Ways to Share the Circle of Light

The advent of DSEK and DMEK processes have also allowed us to do more for recipients. DSEK — descemet stripping automated endothelial keratoplasty — and DMEK — descemet membrane endothelial keratoplasty — are both processes that separate the cornea in different ways in preparation for different types of grafts.

“It’s splitting the cornea into layers,” John summarized. “The graft thickness is about 10-20 microns thick, so that’s about 1/5 of the thickness of a human hair.”

Surgeons have come to rely on eye banks to separate the corneas into the layers they need for their patient and their transplant, resulting in more successful transplants and better outcomes with fewer post-operative infections for the recipients.

The challenging, integral work of splitting the cornea to meet surgeons’ needs is one of Staci’s favorite tasks in her role at the eye bank. “I feel connected to the surgeons and the recipients because I am playing such a critical role at that point.” 

“Since I first learned DMEK, there have been carrier devices that make the graft ready for the surgeons when it arrives to them in surgery. The surgeons have less prep in the OR and something they really appreciate.”

An Eye to the Future

John expects another advancement is coming in the next 10 years but from a different technology. “We’ll add a whole other layer to what the eye bank does in the future with laboratory cell culture and producing transplantable cells or cell grafts in the laboratory."

Such technology could shift eye banking and corneal transplant to serving even more potential recipients than we do today. Instead of one cornea going to one donor, there's a possibility where cultured cells from one donor could help restore vision in several recipients. Such a technological future will require a team that is both skilled and dedicated. Neither is an issue for RMLEB.

“One thing that has always stood out to me no matter what role I've had at the eye bank is it is such a humbling and great responsibility that we have to our community, our donors, our recipients,” Staci said. “It's very humbling to know that we get to play a small role in such a selfless act that one human gives to another. I’m very proud of the work we do here.”