Victoria woman becomes 1st Canadian to receive rare tooth-in-eye surgery

Gail Lane, 74, is one of three B.C. residents receiving a rare vision-restoring surgery this week.

Updated March 13: Gail Lane spoke to CTV News after the first phase of the procedure was completed. Watch the latest story below. The original story follows.

A Victoria woman is recovering after becoming the first person in Canada to undergo part one of a rare surgery to restore her vision.

It’s known as tooth-in-eye surgery, where surgeons quite literally attach a tooth to the front of a patient’s eyeball to restore sight. The medical term is osteo-odonto keratoprostheseis.

“The inner workings of the eye are totally healthy and normal, but a severe injury has damaged the front of the eye so badly that it’s scarred and the patient can’t see out of the eye,” said Dr. Greg Moloney, a surgeon and ophthalmologist.

“This operation restores a clear window at the front of the eyes.”

Moloney is part of the surgical team that performed Tuesday’s tooth-in-eye surgery at Mount Saint Joseph Hospital in Vancouver.

The team extracted a canine tooth from 74-year-old patient Gail Lane. They carved out a hole to make room for a plastic lens, then sewed the tooth to the inside of Lane’s cheek, where it will stay for 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 said. “So the point of implanting it for three months is for it to gain the layer of supporting tissue.”

Why use a tooth?

“The body does not like to have synthetic material attached to the front of the eye,” Moloney said. “It’s kind of like trying to plant a flower in the desert, whereas the tooth is like planting a cactus.”

Moloney hails from Australia, where he and his colleague, Dr. Shannon Webber, have performed the procedure on eight other people.

“The benefit it brings to these people and giving them their lives back and the ability to see their partners and their family, sometimes for the first time – it’s phenomenal,” said Webber, an oral-maxillofacial surgeon who travelled to Vancouver for the surgery.

The operation is suitable for certain patients who have corneal damage, but will not work for those who do not have functioning retinas and optic nerves.

Meet the patients

Lane is recovering and unavailable for an interview, but CTV News spoke with her in 2015.

“One day I could see, one day I couldn’t,” she said at the time.

Lane has been blind for about a decade. A bad reaction to anti-seizure medications triggered an autoimmune disorder, which stole her sight.

“Instead of saying, ‘Oh, I can’t do that anymore and I can’t do that anymore,’ I’m trying to turn my mind to, ‘OK, well what can I do?’” she said.

Lane is one of three B.C. patients receiving the surgery this week. North Vancouver resident Brent Chapman, 33, is also heading to the operating room.

“I’m really excited to open another chapter of my life,” he said.

Chapman has been blind since he was 13, when a severe reaction to medication put him in a coma and damaged his corneas.

He’s had multiple failed surgeries, including 10 corneal transplants.

“There’s a lot of bucket-list things I want to do once… I can see again,” he said.

His and Lane’s eyes will have a black circle in the middle, lined with pink tissue from inside their cheeks.

“You take function over appearance and it’s just going to open up so many more doors for me,” Chapman said.

Pilot program

Six surgeries will be performed as part of a pilot program at Mount Saint Joseph Hospital, Moloney said.

“We’ll be presenting the outcomes of those six cases to Health Canada seeking funding,” he said.

“If we’re successful in getting this up and running and stabilized in Vancouver, then we will be the only active North American centre for the operation.”

The pilot is supported by Providence Health Care and the St. Paul’s Foundation, which raised $430,000 to fund it for three years. After that, Providence Health Care said it intends to build future costs into its budget planning.