News

A collection of recent news, company culture, employee spotlights, and more at Miracles In Sight.

InSights

Update: MIS Face Shield Project Gets a Boost from a 10-Year-Old

A few weeks ago, we posted an article about how the Miracles In Sight team had started to use the organization’s 3D printers to create face shields for health care workers on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, the project has grown significantly, in part, due to the efforts of a 10-year-old boy, his dad, and a remarkable birthday present.Read More

MIS Using 3D Printing to Help Shield Health Care Workers

At Miracles In Sight (MIS), we are always working, innovating and collaborating to improve the quality of care and services in our industry. However, with elective corneal tissue transplants on hold, we’re also applying that same innovative, collaborative spirit to helping our fellow health care professionals on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic. Read More

Meet Angie Smith: Bringing Passion to Every Part of MIS

Angie Smith lights up when she talks about her job. Not just when she talks about the innovations and technical advances, or the donor interactions, or the recipient feedback. She lights up for all of it.

After 17 years with Miracles In Sight, Angie has done just about everything there is to do in the organization. And she still talks about it like it’s the most amazing place on earth.Read More

November is Eye Donation Month!

Eye Donation Month is held each November to help bring awareness to the importance of eye donation. All month long, Miracles in Sight, (with the help of the Eye Bank Association of America (EBAA)) will help generate awareness about the need for eye donation, common misconceptions about the process, and life-changing opportunities that are created when recipients regain their sight through corneal transplants. This year, the theme is “The Power of You” – acknowledging the community of people involved in the journey to restore sight, and the power each person has to make a difference.

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Miracles in Sight Hosts Latin American Surgeons for Wet Lab

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C.Miracles In Sight (MIS) hosted 22 surgeons from Latin America at its eye bank in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The surgeons were part of the first-ever International Duke-Latin America Workshop held April 1 – 2 and sponsored by Mexico-based Sophia Pharmaceutical Labs. Surgeons representing 11 Latin American countries participated in a wet lab and gained valuable hands-on experience working with DMEK, DSAEK and PKP surgical techniques.Read More

A Fitting Tribute

Dean Vavra at Iowa Donor Garden

by Dean Vavra

This is my thirty-seventh official year as an eye banker, but in a way eye banking has been a part of my life much longer than that. A genetic eye disease called granular dystrophy type 2 afflicted my grandmother, my mother and four of my brothers. (I was lucky enough to escape the condition.) This is a particularly cruel form of blindness that causes lesions to grow on the cornea, and even after a corneal transplant these painful opacities grow back into the graft tissue. So, my mother, grandmother and siblings all required multiple corneal transplants. In fact, in the early 1950s, before I was born, my mother and grandmother had two of the first corneal transplants performed in America.Read More

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