ISGS supports sustainable eye care projects around the world.  Two examples of this work are our well equipped permanent eye hospital units in Central America and Africa.  The Roger William Lytle Centro de Ojos in Chichicastenango, Guatemala is the culmination of 15 years of medical mission teams working in an abandoned fire station.  The owners of the largest regional hospital offered half of their ground floor for a permanent eye clinic and surgery center adjacent to the largest marketplace in the Central Highlands, the grand opening of which took place this past year.

Ironically, our inspiration for creating a sustainable devoted eye facility in Guatemala came from Msundwe, Malawi.  Because Malawi is one of the most economically deprived nations on earth, to serve the rural poor we needed to work with Child Legacy International five years ago to create a totally self-sufficient wind- and solar-powered Eye Hospital, equipped with a full array of new modern eye equipment (OCT, FDT, five modalities of laser including SLT, autorefractor, A- and B-scan ultrasonography, Zeiss operating microscopes, Alcon phaco machines, etc).  Our full time locally trained staff see thousands of patients and host international teams for large scale eye camps on a regular basis.  As a consequence of its high standard of excellence our facility was invited to be one of the 6 study centers in all of Africa to partner in the Eyes of Africa Glaucoma Gene Project initiated by the late Rand Allingham and Mike Hauser of Duke University.  In late 2018 we installed a new fully equipped DNA purification lab adjacent to the eye clinic, complete with centrifuges, vortex mixers and hematological subzero storage.  Our Malawi team is listed among the co-authors of the forthcoming landmark study on one of the key causative genes for glaucoma.  This work is vital because it could help identify children at risk of future severe glaucoma long before the disease strikes in adulthood, via focused analysis on a simple blood sample or buccal smear.