Three blind Canadians could soon see again thanks to a surprising source: their teeth.
Yes, you read that right. Over the past week, the trio of patients underwent Canada’s first-ever “tooth in eye” surgeries. While it might sound like something straight out of science fiction, this jaw-dropping procedure has been restoring sight in other parts of the world for decades.
“It is a rare operation that most people have not heard of, even if you are an eye surgeon,” Dr. Greg Moloney, an ophthalmologist and surgeon at Mount Saint Joseph Hospital in Vancouver, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).
Cheeky science
The procedure, called osteo-odonto keratoprosthesis (OOKP), uses a patient’s own tooth to craft a support structure for an artificial cornea.
The operation is broken down into two parts. First, Moloney and his team remove a healthy tooth from each patient, shave it down into a rectangle, drill a hole and pop a plastic optical lens inside. The tooth then gets a temporary home in the patient’s cheek, where it will stay for about three months.
“(The tooth) doesn’t have any connective tissue that I can actually pass a suture through to connect it to the eyeball,” Moloney told CTV News. “So the point of implanting it for three months is for it to gain the layer of supporting tissue.”
During the same procedure, Moloney prepares the eye by removing the top layer of the eye’s surface and replacing it with a soft tissue graft from inside the patient’s cheek. This graft needs a few months to heal so it can support the implant.
So far, Moloney says all the initial procedures have gone smoothly, and the patients will be monitored closely over the next few months.
When it’s time for the second surgery, the tooth will be removed from the cheek and placed into the eyeball.
Moloney and his team will pull back the graft, remove the damaged iris and lens, and sew the tooth (with its new optical lens) into the eye. The graft will then be resewn over the eye, leaving a small hole for the lens to peek through.
The end result is a pink eye with a small black circle through which the patient can finally see again.
Eyes on the prize
A tooth might seem like an unlikely candidate for eye surgery, but it’s actually the perfect fit.
“(Teeth) contains dentin, which is the ideal tissue to house a plastic lens without the body rejecting it,” Moloney explained to The Daily Scan. Plus, the tissue from the cheek recognizes the tooth, making the whole process smoother.
But don’t get too excited just yet — this procedure isn’t risk-free. “With any ocular surgery of any kind, there’s a chance that we could introduce infection and lose all our vision,” Moloney told CBC.
It’s also not meant for everyone. The surgery is often a last-ditch option for people with corneal blindness in the front of the eyes caused by conjunctival scarring from autoimmune diseases, chemical burns and other traumas, but who still have healthy retina and optic nerves.
Despite the risks, the procedure has been restoring sight for several decades in at least 10 countries with a high success rate. A 2022 study out of Italy found that, 27 years post-surgery, 94% of patients still had vision.
Moloney himself has done seven successful tooth in eye surgeries in Australia before bringing his talents to Canada. “The risk-reward ratio for these patients, when they have no vision at all, is well worth it, we think,” he said.
A life-changing gamble
Brent Chapman has undergone 50 surgeries over the past 20 years, all aimed at restoring his sight, and he hopes this is his last one.
The 33-year-old massage therapist from North Vancouver is blind in both eyes due to Stevens-Johnson syndrome, a rare autoimmune reaction triggered by a dose of ibuprofen he took after a basketball game when he was just 13.
Though some of the surgeries he had gave him temporary partial sight, it always faded.
“When I get it back, you know, it would be sort of this great rush,” he told CBC. “Then I’d lose it again and it would be heartbreaking, and I sort of sank into this depression.”
This time, Chapman hopes things will be different. When his doctor first pitched the tooth in eye surgery, he was hesitant. But after speaking with an Australian woman who had undergone the same procedure to tremendous success, he was sold.
“She had been completely blind for 20 years, and is now snow skiing,” he said. Today, Chapman is dreaming about shooting hoops again and traveling the world.
Chapman part of a group of six patients in a pilot program at Mount Saint Joseph Hospital. If the surgeries go well, Moloney and his team plan to pitch Health Canada for funding to open the country’s first OOKP clinic.
“If we’re successful in getting this up and running and stabilized in Vancouver, then we will be the only active North American center for the operation,” he said.
