Sir,

We are grateful to Shukla and Singh1 for their comments about our paper.2 We acknowledge their criticisms and apologize for the errors in the references that they pointed out. We had no intention of suggesting that Ocublue Plus (OP) was not approved in the European Union (EU) but, to the best of our knowledge at the time of the study in 2010, only Brilliant Peel (BP) was available in the EU for commercial use. In our study, we compared the neurosensory retinal thickness between OP and controls in the same animal. No direct comparison was done between OP and other groups like BP and ICG. The reduction in neurosensory retinal thickness in the OP group was significant when compared to the controls. This cannot be extrapolated to compare differences between OP and BP.

As most of the previous publications on OP came from the institution that is commercially producing and marketing it, we felt that it was important to try to independently compare OP with other commercially available products being used to stain the internal limiting membrane during vitreoretinal surgery. We acknowledge the limitations and shortcomings of this laboratory study but would continue to encourage more work to be done in this field to ensure the safety and efficacy of such products post approval. In light of their comments, we agree that our conclusion that OP caused reduction of the RGC density is not accurate.