‘It’s absolutely mind blowing’: Canada’s first tooth-in-eye surgery could restore North Vancouver man’s vision

This week two surgeons are set to perform Canada’s first ever tooth-in-eye surgery which can restore vision to people who are blind.

Brent Chapman was 13 years old when he took two ibuprofen tablets during a basketball tournament and had a severe allergic reaction known as Stevens-Johnson syndrome. He fell into a coma, and when he awoke a month later, he was blind.

“I think I’ve had 10 corneal transplants now in 20 years,” said Chapman, who works as a massage therapist in North Vancouver.

He’s having another procedure on Thursday that he hopes will restore his sight. It’s called tooth-in-eye surgery, and it sounds like science fiction.

“In essence, we are trying to really just replace a clear window on the front of the eye. And the tooth is the perfect structure to hold a focusing piece of plastic or a telescope for the patient to see through,” said Dr. Greg Moloney, a corneal surgeon who perfected the two-part procedure in his native Australia and moved to Vancouver in 2021.

Moloney and oral and maxillofacial surgeon Dr. Shannon Webber, who has flown in from Australia, will perform the initial surgery on Chapman and two other patients this week at Mount Saint Joseph hospital in Vancouver.

The surgeons will remove one of the patient’s canine teeth and glue a small lens inside that tooth.

“After we do the harvesting of the tooth, we implant it into the cheek so there’s a tissue lining. And in three month’s time, we remove it from the pocket in the cheek and sew it onto the front of the eye,” said Webber.

“If we are successful in the surgery, which we all hope we are, and the patient’s retina and nerve at the back of their eye is healthy, then they can recover close to normal vision,” said Moloney. “We have hope, realistic hope, of giving Brent and other patients a normal life again.”

“This could change the suffering I’ve been going through with all these surgeries, give me some stability and maybe even some good vision,” Chapman said.

The first-in-Canada tooth-in-eye surgeries are being funded by the St. Paul’s Foundation. The $430,000 donation will fund the clinic for three years, after which the program will be folded into Providence Health Care’s operating budget.

“I’m incredibly grateful to the St. Paul’s Foundation, all the fundraisers and the donors who, you know, showed up for me and, and others and people like me,” said Chapman, who is also thankful to his parents for going to great lengths to find solutions for his condition.

While he’s been doing the tooth-in-eye surgery for years, it’s not lost on Webber how incredible the procedure is.

“In my job as a surgeon, I’m cutting jaws, breaking faces, moving and reconstructing faces. But people have a hard time fathoming what that actually means, to tell them that I’m putting a tooth in the front of the eye, just it’s absolutely mind blowing,” said Webber.

While vision could be restored for Chapman and the other two patients after they have their second procedures in May, their eyes will look very different.

“It won’t look like a normal eye. It’s covered with some buccal tissue from inside the cheek or the lip, and that will cover the whole structure. So the eye will look pink with a small dark circle in the middle,” said Moloney.

Chapman says the trade-off is worth it.

“You take function over appearance. It’s just going to open up so many more doors,” he said. “It’ll give me freedom again.”

The 33-year-old is optimistic he will finally get to the see the world the way he did before his coma two decades ago.

“There’s a lot of things, bucket list things I want to do once I can see again. It would mean the world to me really.”