Last Saturday (18 May), as part of the congress of Italian eye banking company in L’Aquila, the extraordinary contribution of doctors was celebrated Sergio Ardis and Moreno Marcucci to the history of cornea donation in Lucca and Tuscany.
Sergio Ardis, doctor of the health management, and Moreno Marcucci, who held the same role until a few months ago, gave a masterful reading on history of cornea donation in the Lucca area and in the Tuscan regional one. At the end of the nineties, the two doctors had in fact imported the Spanish model of organ donation to Italy, establishing a scientific collaboration with various transplant centers (Madrid, Pamplona, Alicante, Barcelona, Bilbao, Oviedo, Malaga and Tenerife) aimed at training of Italian doctors and nurses responsible for organ and tissue donation.
The first action to increase donations and therefore transplants concerned the donation of corneas. At the hospital in Lucca (then Campo di Marte) eight patients were on the waiting list for corneal transplants. The donation program began in July 1996 and in the first month of activity all the patients on the list regained their sight thanks to the transplants performed by Pietro Ferretti, head of ophthalmology at the time. A year later, Lucca thus became a national point of reference for cornea transplants and for the donation of heart valves and other tissues. The Tuscany Region therefore commissioned Ardis and Marcucci, with resolution of the Regional Council 577 of 1997, to extend the donation model to the entire region. Corneal donations increased to such an extent that it became possible to set up a center for corneal suitability analysis in Lucca. The first cornea was analyzed by the biologist of the Campo di Marte transfusion center Francesca Pacini, who also recently retired after many years of appreciated work in healthcare. This was the foundation stone of the Cornea Bank of Lucca.
Two years later, in 1999, thanks to the growth of organ and tissue donations and transplants, Tuscany approved the Tuscan Tissue Bank, assigning the Cornea Bank to Lucca. Healthcare workers and the voluntary sector unanimously agreed to name it after Piero Perelli, an ophthalmologist who had performed the first corneal transplant in Lucca. The biologist was appointed director Claudio Giannariniwho held this role until his retirement last year, when he took over his role Lorella Cruschelli which, with its qualified team, continues to revive the tradition of the Cornea Conservation Center of Lucca by always responding optimally to the transplantological needs of eye surgery.
Precisely since 1999, Tuscany became the first Italian region for organ donation and transplantation. Thanks to the work of the two doctors and the many people who have collaborated over time on this virtuous path, hundreds of people in Tuscany receive a transplant every year. In L’Aquila Sergio Ardis and Moreno Marcucci were therefore honored with the more than deserved title of ‘pioneers of corneal transplant’.
