According to a report in the April issue of Archives of Ophthalmology, one cornea from a donor can treat three patients with eye disease.

Cornea is the membrane that covers the front part of the eye. In an eye surgery, only a part of the cornea (the diseased or the damaged part) needs to be transplanted and not the entire cornea.

In a surgery conducted at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, one cornea from a 44 year old donor, who died of cardiac arrest, was used to help three patients- a 40 year old man, a 60 year old man and a 5 year old boy.

“Our strategy of using a single donor corneal tissue for multiple patients opens up the possibility of optimal use of available donor corneal tissue and will reduce the backlog of patients with corneal blindness in countries in which there is a dearth of good-quality donor corneal tissue,” the authors write.