The therapy may hold the cure for many dreaded ills WHEN the patch on six-year-old Sumaiya Aziza's left eye was removed, her reaction, and of her parents, was like a frame out of a Bollywood scene. The tears, the joy, the incredulity, and the words, "Baba, I can see." Aziza's eye was damaged when a packet of wet lime or chuna had exploded into her eyes as she was playing with it at her home near Dhaka. Having run out of hope in Bangladesh, her parents had come to the L.V. Prasad Eye Institute (lvpei) in Hyderabad in August 2001. A special form of cornea transplant was performed on her damaged eye. It was a historic first in India: it's called stem cell therapy. Dr Virendra Sangwan simply took a small piece of limbus (border of cornea) from Aziza's healthy right eye, cultured it on an amniotic membrane in the lab and after 11 days put it back into her wounded left eye. The techniques he used were "indigenous, innovative and low-tech". By 2004, when President A.P. J. Abdul Kalam visited the eye institute, Aziza had near-normal vision with her glasses. Kalam was so impressed that he later invited a senior surgeon of the hospital, Dr Taraprasad Das, now working on retina reconstruction with stem cells, to join him on his East Asia tour to speak of India's stem cell success story. The latest such case of corneal transplant is of Kuldeep Singh, the heroic bus driver who saved hundreds of lives by throwing out a bomb planted in his bus when the October 2005 Delhi blasts took place. Dr Sangwan and his hospital have by now performed the highest number of adult limbal stem cell transplants in the world