NLIGHTENMENT
EYE BANKING
A First-of-its-Kind Corneal Lenticule Banking Service by Jillian Webster
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THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW
Could lenticules correct presbyopia? Everyone over 40 is keen to find out...
R
ecently, the Ministry of Health gave Cordlife Group Limited a go-signal to launch OptiQ, a groundbreaking corneal lenticule banking service in Singapore. This simply means that patients who are undergoing refractive surgeries can store their corneal lenticules to treat ocular conditions that may arise in the future.
These lenticules are now being stored by Cordlife for future use. Here are five things you need to know about the new corneal lenticule banking service in Singapore.
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According to Prof. Donald Tan, partner and senior consultant ophthalmic surgeon at Eye and Retina Surgeons, “a lenticule is a piece of the human cornea, which is shaped like a lens, taken from an individual.” These lenticules are removed during certain corrective refractive surgeries using the small incision lenticule extraction
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(SMILE) procedure, a FDA-approved method for correcting refractive eye problems.
The concept was born to avoid throwing away the lenticules removed during SMILE surgery. Prof. Tan got the idea for lenticule storage while he was heading the Singapore Eye Research Institute
| March/April 2021
(SERI) after receiving a grant from the National Research Foundation (NRF) in Singapore to study glaucoma and cornea in 2007. “Within the corneal field, we were really looking at new ways to perform corneal transplants, as well as new refractive procedures,” Prof. Tan shared. “A lot of these procedures, like laser-assisted in situ keratomileusis (LASIK), reshape the cornea. SMILE was a similar procedure to LASIK, but it had some advantages.” SMILE uses a single VisuMax (Carl Zeiss Meditec, Jena, Germany) femtosecond laser to remove a section of cornea, the lenticule. “We were doing SMILE surgery and all of these lenticules were being thrown away. I had the idea to store this tissue
