The Holland Foundation for Sight Restoration has a vision to integrate a treatment protocol for severe ocular surface failure
In the latest episode of The Ophthalmic Project, Mark Dlugoss speaks with Edward Holland, MD, and Stephen Lane, MD, discuss the goals of The Holland Foundation for Sight Restoration. Through pioneering surgical protocols, coordinated care teams, and the creation of Centers of Excellence, they aim to train more surgeons, expand patient access, and give hope to those once told their vision could not be restored.
Mark Dlugoss:
More than 60,000 people born with birth defects face blindness because of ocular surface failure. Every year, another 100,000 people experience a chemical or a thermal accident that severely impairs their vision. Many of these patients go through years of treatments and surgeries and efforts to improve and hopefully restore their sight. But what happens to these patients when all hope appears lost?
Hello, this is Mark Dlugoss, senior contributing editor for Ophthalmology 360, and welcome to The Ophthalmic Project powered by Ophthalmology 360. In today’s edition of The Ophthalmic Project, we sit down with a well-known cornea surgeon who through his foundation has made it his goal to address a significant unmet need of corneal transplantation for patients who have had severe ocular surface disease. Joining The Ophthalmic Project to provide the details behind these efforts is Dr. Edward Holland, co-founder of the Holland Foundation for Sight Restoration, and Dr. Stephen Lane, the foundation’s executive chairman. Dr. Holland, Dr. Lane. Welcome to The Ophthalmic Project.
Edward J. Holland, MD:
Thanks for having us.
Stephen Lane, MD:
Yeah, thanks Mark.
Mark Dlugoss:
Let’s start off, I want to start off with, I’m asking this question because I think everybody knows Dr. Holland and what he’s accomplished over the years as a surgeon and clinician and as a pioneer in severe ocular diseases. But for me, at what point in your career and research did you begin to realize that you wanted to dedicate your skill set to advancing care for patients with complex ocular conditions and site restoration procedures? Can you provide some background?
Edward J. Holland, MD:
Yeah, thanks, Mark. Fair question. I either deserve the credit or the blame goes to my mentor Richard Lindstrom at University of Minnesota. When I was a resident, Dick convinced me that a fellowship in cornea would be a good career path for me. Then he offered me a job to come join him at the University of Minnesota where he was director of the cornea service. Dick’s idea was for us to build a high-risk corneal transplant program. There wasn’t a program like that in existence. Part of his plan was after my cornea fellowship to do an additional year in ocular immunology. That kind of really set my career apart. After my cornea fellowship at university of Iowa, I went to the National Eye Institute part of the NIH and did a year of ocular immunology. Dick and I started to build this service and we were getting referrals from corneal transplants that have failed multiple times and mistakenly, I thought if we could prevent inflammation with systemic immunosuppression, we could make these graphs successful.
Probably about 20% of the time we could. What we didn’t realize was 80% of those graphs had failed. They didn’t fail from immunologic reasons. They failed because they had severe ocular surface disease and limbal stem cell failure. To put things in perspective, really the understanding of what the limbus anatomy was and what the corneal epithelium really was derived from wasn’t really commonplace until around 1990. That was a few years after I had joined Dick. It was this understanding of why corneas were failing and the understanding of this translational research that it was really not pure immunologic problems, but it was the limbal stem cell deficiencies that had to be addressed. I had attracted all these patients. I had done transplants, they had all failed, now I had to fix them. Along came the understanding of how to do ocular surface stem cell transplantation, and that’s kind of how I got into the business of trying to take care of these patients.
Mark Dlugoss:
Now, in the course of your advancements of developing OLS, you developed what they call the Cincinnati procedure. It gets a surgical technique to treat severe ocular surface damage, particular limbal stem cells deficiency. Could you provide some details behind the procedure and the management paradigm behind it?
Edward J. Holland, MD:
The Cincinnati procedure is one of the techniques we use, but actually I think more importantly is what we call the Cincinnati protocol. We finally, over maybe about 20 years of taking care of these patients, really figured out what was really needed from a entire treatment management standpoint, pre-operative evaluation, surgical techniques, and post-operative care. In the early nineties when we started doing ocular surface stem cell transplants and we can get stem cells from a living relative or a deceased donor from the eye bank, but we didn’t understand the degree of immunosuppression we needed. In those early days, we failed because we didn’t adequately immunosuppress like an organ transplant patient needed. That was the discovery that really I think set our success rate to where it is today, understanding that we really had to adopt all the principles of organ transplantation.
The Cincinnati protocol, as we’ve trademarked this, is really learning from our organ transplant colleagues, specifically renal transplantation. We do all the same preoperative testing. We look for living donors, not deceased donors because we can tissue match those donors. We use the same tissue matching, HLA matching, ABO matching they do. We then incorporate all the techniques of immunosuppression, including some of the high risk techniques that we would use pre-op and intra-op in these patients, and then long-term post-op care. The final key piece on the Cincinnati protocol besides adopting the principles of organ transplantation is really coordinating care of the patient with a transplant coordinator. Again, this is what we learned from renal.
If you were to have a kidney transplant, the person that you spend most of your time with is the transplant coordinator. He or she manages your appointments, takes care of your labs, make sure you’re on the right medications, deals with the side effects. We didn’t have that position in ophthalmology. We were the first cornea service to create the transplant coordinator position based on renal. That allowed us to take care of more patients. All these patients have labs that we have to track. Sometimes the labs are once a month at the minimum, they’re 4 times a year. After you do a few hundred of these patients, that’s a lot of patients you have to track. The final key piece of that Cincinnati protocol is incorporating a transplant coordinator to the management of these patients.
Mark Dlugoss:
Now, you mentioned this as you’re discussing, you talked about the whole team approach and how it plays an important role in achieving outcomes. Can you more or less … Even, I guess you have an internal medicine physician as well that handles the immune suppression for the organ transplant, and then you have the coordinator. There is a full-time team involved with this. Can you explain different roles of each team member and importance?
Edward J. Holland, MD:
You’re absolutely right. It is a coordinated team approach. If you don’t have this team built, you really can’t take care of these patients. First of all, the quarterback of the team has to be the corneal surgeon. It has to be a surgeon that is passionate about taking care of these patients and wants to build the team and lead the team because these patients are very, very complicated and on the team has to be the other ophthalmologists that make up the entire team. We need a retina specialists, glaucoma specialists and oculoplastic surgeons. If we’re talking about chemical injuries and Stevens-Johnson syndrome and mucus membrane pemphigoidall leading causes of ocular surface failure with stem cell failure, they have oculoplastic problems and they have glaucoma problems, and then ultimately a lot of them getting retina problems. You need the full ophthalmic component. The next component that you’re referred to is internal medicine.
I’ve seen some doctors try to partner with rheumatology or oncology, but really we want to be at the top of our game in anti-rejection. Really the field that’s the leader, the subspecialty that invented this field is a renal transplant folks. We partner with nephrology, not with oncology/rheumatology, but nephrology. When they change their treatment paradigm with new medications or new preoperative testing, we do exactly the same. Now, I’ve been doing this long enough that the healthy patients that do well, they don’t really have to collaborate with renal. We have the head of the renal transplant service, a wonderful person named Dr. Amit Govil at the University of Cincinnati. He’s the head of the renal transplant program there. He is on our team and we have him collaborate on complex patients, patients with medical problems, patients with side effects of medications, and he is a critical part of the team. We try not to overburden him with the day-to-day because I’ve been doing things a long time with my president transplant coordinator and she and I can handle most of it because of our experience.
Mark Dlugoss:
Now, what’s your success rate like? Just expound on it.
Edward J. Holland, MD:
Well, again, what we learned from renal was in the early days we knew you could do a living donor or a deceased donor. Living donor, the most common procedures called a living-related conjunctival limbal allograft we’re taking conjunctiva and limbal stem cells and transferring to the ocular surface. Or you could take an eye from a deceased donor that was donated to the eye bank and use the cornea and sclera rim to transplant stem cells. There’s not a lot of surgeons that do any of this. Less than 1% of corneal surgeons will do stem cell transplants. But the few that do really kind of defaulted to the deceased donor procedure called keratolimbal allograft, partly because it’s just easier. You don’t have to tissue type, you don’t have to go through the family dynamics of finding who’s the right donor, and maybe there are some dynamics that doesn’t make it easy for that.
But what we realized, renal you years ago pivoted to living donors because the success rate was better because you could tissue type them and match them and lower the rejection rate. We found out, Mark, the exact same thing. Early on, most of all our procedures were deceased donors, keratolimbal allograft. The last 15 years we’ve really pivoted to doing living-related conjunctival limbal allograft in every single case we can because we tissue type, we ABO type and our rejection rate is lower. If we look at our success rate with living-related donors, our success rate is about 85%. With keratolimbal allograft, it’s about 70 to 75%. The big difference is we have a higher rejection rate on the deceased donors, the keratolimbal allograft procedure because we can’t tissue type and our preference is living donors now.
Mark Dlugoss:
I noticed talking about the limbal allograft, I noticed that during the Cornea Day at the 2025 ASCRS meeting, you presented the inaugural Holland Lecture. Congratulations for that.
Edward J. Holland, MD:
Thank you.
Mark Dlugoss:
Your lecture basically said that living-related conjunctival limbal allograft should be the first line of therapy for limbal stem cell deficiency. Can you outline your lecture a little bit and discussed the points and what the take home message was?
Edward J. Holland, MD:
Thank you, Mark. It was a great honor and I was very humbled by that. I was trying to convince the surgeons in the audience number. This is one of the biggest unmet needs of all ophthalmology, 99.9% of these patients are not taken care of. They’re either misdiagnosed or ignored. Part of the message was we really as a corneal specialty, it’s time. We’ve had these surgical procedures around for over 30 years. We’ve published on the treatment protocols, the Cincinnati protocol, it’s peer-reviewed and substantiated and it’s time other surgeons really get into the game. We owe it to patients.
But then really the small number of surgeons that do it either want to do the SLET procedure called simple limbal epithelial transplantation because they take a small amount of cells or the ones that really are trying to do the best procedure are doing the keratolimbal allograft and was trying to convince the audience that SLET cannot take care of severe ocular surface disease. If a patient has a chemical injury with sublepharon and conjunctival scarring, limbal failure and corneal scarring, taking a one millimeter piece of limbus and chopping it up and putting on the ocular surface doesn’t work. But that seems to be the latest hot procedure that I see my patients come in who need second opinions because they fail, then it simply doesn’t work. It is just not a good operation for patients with severe ocular surface disease.
Trying to convince surgeons that if it’s a unilateral problem, a conjunctival limbal autograph from the fellow eye taking conjunctival and limbus, or if it’s a bilateral problem in severe, the living-related conjunctival limbal allograft. Now, you did mention that Cincinnati procedure, which we published years ago is which the most severe eyes, we can’t simply use a living related donor because we only get tissue from 6 and 12 o’clock of the donor eye. We only can take about 40% of tissue. Because there’s so much damage to the ocular surface we added at 3 and 9 o’clock keratolimbal tissue from the eye bag from a deceased donor. The combination of the living-related tissue and the deceased donor tissue is what’s called the Cincinnati procedure, and we use that in the most severe eyes.
Mark Dlugoss:
What kind of reaction did you get from your lecture?
Edward J. Holland, MD:
It was mixed. I think it was very pointed and kind of a stern message, and maybe some people were offended, I don’t know, but a lot of people were not. I’ve had several people right after the lecture come up to me from very famous institutions and say one in particular from a very, very famous institution out, he said, “I am ashamed that we do not offer these procedures to these patients. It’s shame on us and we want to do a better job.” I will tell you that surgeon, and I won’t mention his name now until he builds his program, but I know he will. He’s come out, he’s spent a week with me. He’s learning these techniques.
He’s going to build a center of excellence at a very prestigious place out east. I had several people come up to me and email me afterwards saying, “How do I get started?” I think I struck a nerve with, I think it’s going to be the young corneal surgeon who’s not stuck in their ways that want to make a difference. I think a lot of senior people, they kind of do what they do and it is probably too hard to get in the game, but there’s plenty of outstanding, brilliant young surgeons who’ve actually realized the tremendous unmet need that we are trying to address here.
Mark Dlugoss:
Sounds like the future looks promising when it comes to this to your procedure and the whole concept of restoring sight with difficult cases.
Edward J. Holland, MD:
I sure hope so.
Mark Dlugoss:
Because Dr. Holland, you’ve been able to achieve with your protocol and advanced care management paradigm, The Holland Foundation for Sight Restoration was founded. Can either you or Dr. Lane please provide a history of the foundation, how the foundation came about its mission, its vision, its goals?
Edward J. Holland, MD:
Well, Ed, you know the story actually better than I do. Because I wasn’t necessarily there from the very inception, but essentially the message that Ed has just talked about is really so critically important, and we’ve all heard it. Those of us who’ve known Ed for a long time have heard this message for many years. Finally, I think with the combination of Ed and Robert Dempsey, the two of them really were the most instrumental in sort of coming up with the idea. A lot of the credit, probably most of the credit actually, it goes to Bob Dempsey who essentially said, look, this is really important. We’re not getting the word out like we should in the sort of conventional ways in which you do these things, which are lectures and instructional workshops and things like that.
We need to start a foundation because good old Dr. Holland is probably not going to be around here for the next 30 years doing this. He’s doing probably 99% of all of these kinds of cases throughout the world. We really need to establish some sort of a foundation into which we can have other surgeons participate and who can help spread the word and the foundation itself be a voice piece, if you will, of helping to spread the word regarding this and become a number of spokespeople responsible for that. Bob Dempsey being very energetic and very passionate about this, really took the reins and began the Holland Foundation for Sight Restoration and recruited at the same time a number of really significant board members to participate in this.
I was fortunate enough to be asked to participate in this, and it’s from its inception. That’s kind of the beginnings of it. We went about the business of establishing mission statements and vision statements and forming the board and forming then committees and so on afterwards so that it really became a true foundation. As we continue to grow, have added pieces to this in terms of marketing and in terms of an executive director, a full-time position and so on, and really started to rev up the engine for fundraising activities to meet the mission and to meet the vision of the foundation.
Mark Dlugoss:
Yeah, you mentioned Bob Dempsey being an integral part. I’ve known Bob for over 20 years, and I’ve noticed that about him and anything he touches, whether it’s his work related or it’s his contribution back, he always goes full guns behind it, and he’s always enthusiastic about helping. Well, after many years of serving on the board of the Holland Foundation for Sight Restoration, Dr. Lane, you were named executive chairman of the foundation about seven months ago. Can you outline how you got involved with the foundation, how you became executive chairman and describe your role now as the executive chairman?
Edward J. Holland, MD:
Yeah, thanks, Mark. I mean, essentially the history between Dr. Holland and myself really goes back to those early days where he was blaming Dr. Lindstrom for getting himself involved in that. I guess he can also blame Dr. Lindstrom for getting involved with me and our friendship as we go way back, because I was the fellow at University of Minnesota with Dick Lindstrom at the same time that Ed was senior resident. That’s when we met. Our friendship has extended to this very day. Through all of that and through both of our careers. Bob Dempsey and I are good friends as well. Essentially, Bob posed the idea of the foundation, engaged with several of us to see if we would be interested in sort of pursuing the goals of admission of this foundation. Several of us chose to do it. That’s really how I got started in it.
The major function from a fundraising standpoint, Mark, has really been from the very inception and really continues to this very day of raising funds to establish centers of excellence. As I said, the Cincinnati Eye Institute and Ed were certainly the first ones in the world, but certainly in this country that were doing this. The expansion beyond that really was to try and provide the infrastructure that Ed described in terms of especially the technician that would be responsible for looking at all these lab tests. As Ed mentioned, this isn’t a position that really is in every department. In fact, it’s not existent at all. At the cost of that position, which is significant in the role, it’s really not something that somebody can kind of do on a part-time basis. It’s a full-time job as Ed described. We really needed to raise funds for a full-time position in departments that are already very strapped for cash as they try and continue to keep their departments going.
Our mission right from the very beginning was to raise money to establish Centers of Excellence that would be able to first and foremost, hire full-time technician for that role. That was really sort of the initial impetus that kind of got the whole foundation going. We’ve been absolutely blessed with just a fantastic board and unlike many types of boards that people sit on, this is really a working board. That’s what makes I think this board so unique with people like Bob Dempsey and myself and Christie Markowitz and Michael Onuscheck, and people who are true professionals who have other jobs. They’re working full-time jobs and then doing this in addition. What happened is that I essentially, after my career as a clinician, surgeon was over in career working with one of the big ophthalmic strategics, came to a close, I was retiring, and at the same time, Bob was revving up in a new project that he was involved in and just simply didn’t have the time to do it.
It became kind of a natural extension for Bob to pass the baton to someone else who had more time. I happened to be the guy standing at the front of the line with the most time on his hands. The position was kind of passed on in that way, and I was very honored to accept it and to sort of take it from there. Bob is still on the board and still is very active, but again, not necessarily to the same degree that he was. As I said, I think the important factor is that we really wanted to have, and people were part of a working board, and what I saw as the vision for the foundation was really to rev up this working board and to really get them clicking on all cylinders and to probably expand really what we were doing.
Obviously, fundraising is a major area that is important to us, but then what exactly to do with the funds choosing the centers of excellence and how to set up the centers of excellence and so on, really became a priority for us. That’s where we continue to head. I know Ed will probably talk a little bit about it too, but one of the areas that I think is vital at this point is the whole educational arm of the Holland Foundation. Ed mentioned that fewer than 1% of corneal surgeons are doing the procedure.
Why is that? I think a lot of it is simply because there’s not good information out there on terms of how to diagnose this, number 1, how to treat it, what it takes to treat it. There are, I think, passionate surgeons out there, the quarterbacks that Ed was talking about, who can do this procedure and do it in a much more large extent so that we can have a nationwide network of these kinds of centers of excellence that can work together, but again, cover large geographic area so that everybody’s not flying to Cincinnati to have their procedure done.
Mark Dlugoss:
You mentioned the Centers of Excellence, obviously, and initially, aren’t you talking about having 6 of them initially. Do you have the location set for those 6 centers?
Stephen Lane, MD:
We have now 4 Centers of Excellence in the world. The inaugural center was of course the Cincinnati Eye Institute that was established in 2021 by Dr. Holland. Following that, the University of California Irvine in California, which is being led by Dr. Marjan Farid was established in 2023, followed closely by the Virginia Eye Consultants in Norfolk, Virginia. That was led by Albert Cheung, which was also in 2023. Then most recently, Mass Eye and Ear in Boston, that’s led by Thomas Dohlman, that was established in 2024. Right now we have four active ongoing sites within about a 2-, 3-year period of time that have been established.
I don’t know that we have necessarily, Mark, a set number in mind. We want to have a significant geographic spread throughout the country so that if you live in the Southeast, there’s some place in the Southeast that you can have that done. If you’re living in the Northwest, there’s some place there. I think ultimately we’re probably talking about 6 to 8 Centers of Excellence, but there’s not necessarily a number in mind as much as there is trying to have a reasonable geographic representation across the country of where these centers are.
Edward J. Holland, MD:
Mark, and if I could interject, I would tell you the key key piece is the corneal surgeon, right? You could have everything else. You could have a big department with fantastic retina, glaucoma plastics, a dedicated chairman, a big renal transplant center down the hall. But if you don’t have a cornea surgeon that’s passionate about taking care of these patients, and they take so much more time, we see them at 1 day, at 5 days, at 2 weeks, once a month. These are in the postop periods and every couple months. When you start doing a lot of them, you have a lot of postop visits and a lot of time. You really have to have somebody who’s dedicated to take these patients. You have to have the cornea surgeon that want to do it. If we find a bright focused cornea surgeon that’s passionate, we can build a program around that person.
Stephen Lane, MD:
To speak to that, which is really, I think very interesting. I think points exactly to what Ed was talking about is that there are 4 Centers of Excellence. Obviously Ed’s being the first, but of the three remaining, only 1 of those 3 centers is somebody that Ed trained. The other 2 centers are people that were trained elsewhere, but had that passion that Ed was talking about to, it’s not something they grew up with, it’s not something they were trained to do. This is something that they’ve heard the lectures, they’ve heard and read the articles that have been published on this. Because of that had a passionate interest in doing this. While I think all of these folks are to one degree or another, disciples of Ed, they weren’t necessarily disciples in the first degree having trained with him, they trained elsewhere, really thought that this was important and then went to learn it on their own with Ed as their mentor and teacher.
Mark Dlugoss:
Once the Centers of Excellence have been established, what kind of support does the foundation provide them in terms of moving forward?
Stephen Lane, MD:
Well, I think first of all, I mean part of the agreement as a Center of Excellence is a financial one. We’ve agreed to fund them at least in part over a variable time period, usually 2 to 3 years, so that they can get up and going with the full intent of having them be able to establish their presence, number one, and then become self-sustaining themselves based upon their own department and the things that they will build as part of the process. Most of the dollars, as I said, basically are earmarked for this coordinator position because it doesn’t exist without that kind of funding. By being able to provide that funding, they can go ahead and get things off the ground. The second big part of it is education standpoint.
I mean, it’s a constant education process and educational programs are held throughout the year, usually in the biggest one in the fall in Cincinnati, where there’s a gathering, if you will, of people who have interest in this, who want to learn about it, some who are doing it, some who are not doing it. Providing the educational capabilities for that has become a real important part of this as well, and is something that’s provided by the foundation. Then a lot of, I’ll say miscellaneous, but it’s also extremely important. Things like billing and coding and those kinds of activities that are part and parcel of any procedure, but particularly this one, because it’s just like the procedure itself. It’s pretty complicated in terms of how to bill it properly and how to code it properly so that you can get paid for it and the surgeons can get paid for it. We have a very strong group within the foundation that spends a lot of time working with those kinds of services for the participants and the correct documentation so that they can be paid.
Mark Dlugoss:
It’s pretty important, as we know, coding and billing can be really crazy with the insurance companies.
Stephen Lane, MD:
Indeed.
Mark Dlugoss:
Let me ask you also, what about from the patient’s perspective? What does the foundation help with them in trying to either make them aware of what’s available or just helping out in terms of understanding what’s going on?
Edward J. Holland, MD:
It’s interesting, Mark. I’d say more patients find us on their own searching the internet than are referred by cornea specialists, or maybe it’s 50/50, but a significant number because the diagnosis of limbal stem cell failure is not well understood. If you look at, in my lectures is an interesting point. I start out with a question to the audience. With all those hundreds of corneal surgeons, what is the most common procedure done for total limbal efficiency in ocular surface failure? It’s penetrating keratoplasty; 90% of the audience answered that correctly. The next question I asked, what is the success rate of penetrating keratoplasty in total limbal efficiency? It’s 0%. The audience actually got that right as well. There in lies the huge disconnect.
There’s some degree of denial when you see this patient with a history of a chemical burn and a opaque cornea, and the surgeon just tries to get away with a PK and another one and another one. Unfortunately, families are told there’s nothing to do. You need to stay blind and move on with your life. Many patients are told that, and then the lucky families don’t give up and they realize there’s something else out there and they come and find one of our centers and they get proper treatment. We absolutely need to make this people aware, not only doctors, but patients aware that there are successful treatments for ocular surface disease with limbal failure.
Mark Dlugoss:
Now in the foundation’s efforts to broaden the education and training for physicians, surgeons rather, nationwide, especially surgeons who wish to learn and implement not only the Cincinnati protocol, but the Cincinnati procedure, the foundation has developed conferences to train physicians. I know that the Holland Foundation is currently planning one this fall. Can you provide the details of these? Of not only this upcoming conference, but all your conferences when and where they’re at, its length, the basic information that interested physicians may want to know?
Edward J. Holland, MD:
Yeah. Our main conference is held in November. I think it’s November 14th this year, Steve, in Cincinnati. We have, I think about 35 surgeons now planning to attend, and which we’ll look at three levels of surgeons. One is they want to know more. They’ve never done a procedure. The second level is somebody just starting out and wants to become a better ocular surface transplant surgeon. Then a group of us have been doing a long time that we’re trying to come up with kind of coordinated protocols and how to take care of these patients. But under Steve’s guidance, we’ve got an education committee and a young surgeon named Albert Cheung in Norfolk, Virginia, who’s one of the busier ocular surface transplant surgeons. He has really coordinated an effort. Besides that meeting in Cincinnati, our annual meeting, we’re providing courses at the American Academy of Ophthalmology skills transfer courses, ASCRS and ESCRS. We’re going to put on skills transfer courses at those three major meetings. Then the plan is web-based education through his committee to reach even more surgeons virtually.
Mark Dlugoss:
Go ahead.
Stephen Lane, MD:
I’m sorry. The other thing, Mark, that I would just interject for the audience sake is that a lot of this information, and soon all of this information that we’re talking about in terms of the educational processes will be on our website. The website is hollandfoundationforsight.org, just all one word. It’s very simple and it’s just full of information. That’s again, one of the things that we’re kind of proud of recently is to redo our website so that it’s much more up to date and much more comprehensive than what it’s done. For your listeners, hollandfoundationforsight.org is a good source of information for all of this.
Mark Dlugoss:
I also, I was going to ask, my next question was ask you if the physicians were interested in getting involved with the Holland Foundation, how could they reach out through either donation or participation? Again, reach out to hollandfoundationforsight.org.
Stephen Lane, MD:
That would probably the easiest. I’m on, my email’s on that list, so they can certainly contact me directly. We’ll sort of deflect all this from Ed and I’ll make sure that they can figure out a way to get involved. But we’re seeing much more of that. That’s been, again, one of the real initiatives that I’m trying to bring forward is this sort of recognition of the problem and getting people involved in it, even if they’re not necessarily interested in being involved from a standpoint of actually doing the procedure from a standpoint of diagnosing the procedure and getting them to the right people. Again, getting them to these centers of excellence I think is really one of our goals going forward so that we can get a much more high recognition of the problem that’s out there. But absolutely the website’s the easiest place to go to and to initiate the first communications.
Mark Dlugoss:
Well, we’ve covered a lot of information regarding Dr. Holland’s work in ocular surface diseases, as well as the role of the Holland Foundation for Sight Restoration in helping Dr. Holland’s efforts in for sight restoration. Are there any points of discussion we may have overlooked in our discussion or is there anything you would like to add before we close?
Edward J. Holland, MD:
I would just like to send the message to people in ophthalmology, whether they’re corneal surgeons and glaucoma surgeons or retinal surgeons. These patients are rare. We’re not treating enough of them, but they’re out there. Number 1 is, stop doing the wrong surgery. Stop doing corneal transplants for these patients. Unfortunately, a significant number of patients get multiple corneal transplants, and not only does it not work, it makes the eye worse, it creates inflammation, it makes them immunosensitive to donor antigens and harder for us to treat. Number 2, if you can’t treat it, just find someone who will treat it, give these patients an opportunity to get their vision back. We’re at a stage now where we have really good success rates and certainly a lot better than I did. We did 20, 30 years ago. We’re very proud of how we can take care of not all the patients, but a very significant number of patients with these terrible ocular problems.
Mark Dlugoss:
Well, that concludes today’s Ophthalmic Project podcast. I want to thank Dr. Holland and Dr. Lane for spending their time outlining the mission and work of the Holland Foundation for Sight Restoration. I also want to thank you, the viewers, for watching, and I hope you’ll join us for the next edition of The Ophthalmic Project powered by Ophthalmology 360. Until next time, have a great day.
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