Man will have his own tooth implanted into his eye in rare surgery to restore his sight

A blind Canadian man is set to have his own tooth implanted into his eye in a bid to regain his sight.

Brent Chapman is undergoing ‘tooth in eye’ surgery called osteo-odonto keratoprosthesis (OOKP).

Chapman has undergone 50 surgeries over the past two decades to restore his sight, and now, he’s hoping that the tooth method is the one that sticks.

The 33-year-old massage therapist is blind in both eyes because of a rare autoimmune disease known as Stevens-Johnson syndrome.

Brent Chapman could be the first person in Canada to undergo an experimental surgery to save his sight (Facebook/St. Paul's Foundation/Providence Health Care)

The syndrome is a serious skin condition which occurs when the body reacts to certain medications, as per the NHS.

But for Chapman, his ordeal began at 13 when he took a dose of ibuprofen after a basketball game.

While his prior surgeries allowed him temporary partial sight, it always faded, and now he could be able to get it back for good.

“When I get it back, you know, it would be sort of this great rush,” he told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). “Then I’d lose it again and it would be heartbreaking, and I sort of sank into this depression.”

While he as initially hesitant to try the first-in-Canadian-history treatment, after talking to an Australian woman who had undergone the same procedure, he was sold.

“She had been completely blind for 20 years, and is now snow skiing,” he said.

Dr Greg Moloney will be leading the surgery (Getty Stock Images)

As one of six people trying out the surgery at Mount Saint Joseph Hospital, Dr Greg Moloney and his team could go on to open their own OOKP clinic off the back of the possible success.

“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,” Moloney said.

“It is a rare operation that most people have not heard of, even if you are an eye surgeon,” the doctor, who is an ophthalmologist and surgeon at Mount Saint Joseph Hospital, told CBC.

The procedure uses a patient’s own tooth to create an artificial cornea by removing a tooth, shaving it down to a rectangle, drilling a hole and putting a plastic optical lens inside of it.

Then, the tooth is placed inside of the patient’s cheek for three months so that it can gain a layer of connective tissue to be sutured and placed inside of the eye.

The eye is then prepared by cutting away the top layer of its surface and replacing it with a soft tissue graft.

For Chapman, this tooth-to-cheek procedure went well, according to Moloney.

But he will need to be monitored before he can do ahead with the second surgery to implant the tooth into his eye.

Once Moloney and his team remove the damaged iris and lens, and sew the tooth into the eye, the graft will then be resewn over the eye, with a small hole so that Chapman can look out of it.

The tooth will be implanted into Chapman's eye (Facebook/St. Paul's Foundation/Providence Health Care)

While you might think it’s weird that they’re using a tooth, it’s the perfect candidate.

“(Teeth) contains dentin, which is the ideal tissue to house a plastic lens without the body rejecting it,” Moloney said to The Daily Scan.

But there are risks.

“With any ocular surgery of any kind, there’s a chance that we could introduce infection and lose all our vision,” Moloney explained to CBC.

The surgery is meant for those with corneal blindness in the front of the eyes, which can be caused by conjunctival scarring from autoimmune diseases, trauma, or chemical burns.

Those people still have healthy retina and optic nerves.

The surgery has seen a 94 per cent success rate in 10 countries before Moloney brought it to Canada.