NEW DELHI: It's a breakthrough that could change the lives of millions. A team of doctors from the country's premier medical research institute, AIIMS, has broken new grounds in ophthalmology by using a single donated cornea to help three patients recover their vision.

Until now, one donated cornea was required to revive the eyesight of one patient. The latest breakthrough means the wait for cornea donors could go down significantly for the visually-impaired. In a country like India, where eye donation is still not so popular, this spells a ray of hope for lakhs of sightless people.

The AIIMS team used the cornea of a 44-year-old donor, who died of a heart attack, and sliced it to transplant its different parts into the eyes of three different patients in one day - one of them 60 years old, another around 40, and the third a five-year-old boy.

What's more, follow-up of the three patients showed that there was no rejection - in other words, the surgeries were 100% effective. New tissues had grown over the transplant, while their visual acuity improved greatly in just three months. After successfully testing the surgery on 20 more patients, the team has announced its feat in the latest edition of the journal Archives of Ophthalmology.

The team, led by professor of ophthalmology Dr J S Titiyal, an expert in cornea and refractive surgery, and his former colleague Dr Rasik Vajpayee, now based at the University of Melbourne, sliced the tissue of the cornea into three parts to replace diseased areas of three patients.

The 40-year-old-man had a diseased endothelium (deepest part of the cornea responsible for regulating fluid), while the 60-year-old man suffered from a defective corneal strome (thick transparent middle layer). The little boy had a total limbal stem cell deficiency following chemical burns in his right eye.