A British blind man recently regained his sight through a method that uses one of his own teeth implanted in his eyeball.
Ian Tibbetts underwent a procedure called osteo-odonto-keratoprosthesis (OOKP), which involves a two-step process: first, the patient has a tooth removed and the tooth is fitted with optics by a small lens that's put in a hole drilled in the enamel. Then, the tooth is implanted on the inside of the patients' cheek, so that blood vessels and the inner mucosal lining of the cheek can grow. About four months later, the tooth is then implanted on the eye, restoring sight.
The BBC recently produced a documentary surrounding 42-year-old Tibbetts' surgery called "The Day I Got My Sight Back." Tibbetts, who became more and more blind as the years passed, never saw the faces of his four-year-old twin children. He'd tried a handful of operations and surgeries to no avail. His final choice was to undergo osteo-odonto-keratoprosthesis. Cameras followed the former forklift truck driver from Telford, Shropshire as he went through multiple intense operations in efforts to regain his sight.
This procedure isn't anything new - Italian ophthalmic surgeon Professor Benedetto Strampelli discovered OOKP in the early 1960s, according to the Irish Independent.
OOKP is used for the most severe instances of corneal blindness, the U.S. National Library of Medicine stated in their description of the procedure. Most patients who seek out OOKP operations were not born blind, and usually undergo OOKP surgery during the advanced stages of their blindness.
