Surgeons pull a patient's canine tooth, carve it into a tiny frame for a plastic lens, grow it inside the cheek for months, and then stitch it into the eye. It sounds improbable. Yet a review spanning five decades shows that, for many patients with otherwise untreatable corneal blindness, the tooth-built lens keeps working for 20 years or longer.
The study, published in the November 2025 issue of the British Journal of Ophthalmology, is the longest-running look at osteo-odonto-keratoprosthesis, or OOKP. It arrives as Canada's first three patients to receive the operation report seeing faces, pets and city skylines again.
