Bangladesh

While corneal transplant procedures are commonplace in the United States and Europe, those with corneal blindness in developing countries are woefully underserved due to a lack of available corneal tissue. In fact, over 10 million people around the world are in need of a corneal transplant.

Project Bangladesh is a national program to alleviate corneal blindness in a country that has the highest number of corneally blind, per square kilometer, of any country in the world. Approximately 500,000 patients in Bangladesh are in need of a transplant, yet only around 60 receive transplants from locally sourced corneas per year. This program is designed to increase the number of transplants to 5,000 within two years, and is expected to scale up in subsequent years.

Our goal is to establish a unique, self-sustaining and affordable national cornea retrieval program that will exponentially increase the number of local transplantable corneas and be emulated by other developing countries.