L.V. Prasad Eye Institute in India, and Monty Montoya
For two decades now, Dr. Paul Dubord has crusaded to spread the cure for corneal blindness to the developing countries where it is needed most.
Paul's work began with a trip to India. His approach was simple. Attack the disease where it spreads the most misery — in developing countries where 90% of the 10 million people suffering from curable corneal blindness live today.
On that first trip, Paul taught fellow surgeons how to do corneal transplants. That visit sparked more calls for help and more trips by Paul to new countries. As the ranks of skilled surgeons grew, Paul and his pupils came face to face with the elephant in the room — all this training would be wasted without access to the cornea tissue needed to perform sight-restoring transplants. And that tissue was in short supply even in developed countries like Canada. Without eye banks in their own countries to supply tissue, skilled surgeons would be helpless to restore sight to their people. And those eye banks did not exist.
To show the way, Paul joined in a project to establish the Ramayamma International Eye Bank as an arm of the L.V. Prasad Eye Institute in Hyderabad, India. Always in recruitment mode, Paul took SightLife CEO Monty Montoya to Hyderabad in the early 2000's on another of his training trips. Monty was so excited to see what was being accomplished that he quickly committed our charitable organization to help with the eye bank part of this project.
As others join this effort, success grows. In 1990, this center did only 25 transplants with local tissue. Today, it is one of the largest eye banks in the developing world. Dr. Dubord's early work has grown into an eye banking center of excellence that is THE blueprint for the rest of the developing world.
Now, successes and lessons learned from our first 10 years of working together have led SightLife and Dr. Dubord to collaborate on a strategy for eliminating corneal blindness worldwide.
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