Assessment of the Dutch organ-culture system of corneal preservation within the Eye Bank of South Australia.

Thirteen per cent of all corneas harvested by the Eye Bank of South Australia during 1986 were discarded because storage time in McCarey-Kaufman medium exceeded four days. We have therefore examined the suitability of the Dutch method of long-term corneal storage for our purposes. Twenty-two human corneas that had been discarded from the Eye Bank were assessed using the trypan blue-sucrose staining technique, and then placed into long-term storage for 15 to 17 days. They were then reassessed by vital dye staining before permanent flat-mounts were prepared for silver staining of the endothelium. A good correlation (albeit subjective) was found between the non-destructive and destructive techniques of endothelial cell assessment. Those corneas that failed to survive organ culture storage were easily detected. The Dutch system of corneal preservation and post-storage assessment seems well-suited to Australian eye-banking.

Donor cornea procurement: six-year review of the role of the eye bank in South Australia.

The Lions Eye Bank of South Australia was established six years ago and has collected corneas from 790 donors. The consent rate is currently 82% of requests made. Two-thirds of donors have been male, with mean donor age/year varying from 54 to 64 years (range two to 93 years). Cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, trauma and haemorrhage account for 80% of all donor deaths. Mean death to enucleation time is five hours. Corneas assessed as being of excellent or very good quality are released preferentially from the bank; those with central endothelial cell counts of less than 1500 cells/mm2 are discarded. Fewer than 1% of donors have returned a positive result for HIV or hepatitis B. Of the 1580 corneas collected by the bank, 863 (55%) have been used for transplantation with a primary non-function rate of 0.46%. The evolving policies, logistics of operation and methodologies employed by the bank are described in detail.

Chronic expression of P-selectin on endothelial cells stimulated by the T-cell cytokine, interleukin-3.

P-selectin expressed on the surface of endothelium mediates leukocyte adhesion in vitro and rolling in vivo. Several inducers of cell-surface P-selectin expression on endothelial cells (EC) have previously been identified, all of which yield transient cell-surface expression of P-selectin lasting minutes to a few hours. We now show that a T-lymphocyte product, interleukin-3 (IL-3), stimulates the long-term endothelial cells (HUVEC). IL-3 induced cell-surface P-selectin expression in two phases. An initial peak at 10 minutes was followed by a prolonged upregulation beginning 16 hours after IL-3 addition and lasting at least 4 days. The level of P-selectin expression induced by IL-3 added for 48 hours was similar to that induced by treatment of HUVEC for 10 minutes with thrombin, and the effect of adding IL-3 for 48 hours followed by thrombin for 10 minutes was additive. Induction of cell-surface P-selectin expression by IL-3 was blocked by pretreatment of EC with a blocking monoclonal antibody against the IL-3 receptor alpha-chain. Lipopolysaccharide (LPS), tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF alpha) and a mutant form of IL-3 with decreased potency did not induce cell-surface P-selectin expression after 48 hours' incubation with HUVEC, suggesting that the effect was specific to IL-3. The increase in cell-surface P-selectin expression occurring after 16 hours of incubation with IL-3 was accompanied by a similar prolonged increase in the steady-state mRNA level that was not observed at 10 minutes after IL-3 addition. As T-lymphocyte infiltration is a hallmark of chronic inflammation, our observations suggest that the secretion of IL-3 by T lymphocytes may serve to maintain the inflammatory state during chronic inflammation.