The nation’s organ transplant industry for decades received warm-and-fuzzy news coverage of its life-saving successes. But it suddenly finds itself facing unprecedented regulatory scrutiny—with a 65-year-old Indiana eye bank the latest player caught in the glare.

U.S. Food and Drug Administration records show that the agency’s late January inspection of the Indiana Lions Eye Bank found that in the prior three years it had accepted donations from five people with a “documented diagnosis or clinical evidence of sepsis.”