Boston Hospital Gets First U.S. Go-Ahead for Face Transplants
File this under FASCINATING.
Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston has once again made history. In December 1954, future Nobel Prize winner Dr. Joseph Murray performed the world’s first successful human organ transplant there when he transplanted a kidney from 23-year-old Ronald Herrick to his seriously ill identical twin brother Richard Herrick. The Harvard Medical School Professor of Surgery Emeritus later went on to pioneer allografts, tissue and organ transplants between genetically different individuals of the same species, in 1959 and cadaveric renal transplants in 1962.
Now Brigham and Women’s Hospital is back in the international headlines. The New England Organ Bank recently gave a group of surgeons at the medical facility authorization to perform controversial partial face transplants. This development makes the hospital the first in the United States approved to conduct the highly selective procedure.
The first ever human partial face transplant was performed on France’s 38-year-old Isabelle Dinoire in November 2005. During the groundbreaking procedure at Amiens University Hospital, surgeons Bernard Devauchelle and Jean-Michel Dubernard successfully replaced Dinoire’s nose, lips, and chin, which her Labrador had mauled, with those of brain-dead Maryline St. Aubert.
Face transplants inspire heated debate for a number of reasons, including the fact that they are widely considered cosmetic rather than life-saving. Another prohibitive factor is that in addition to having severe facial disfigurement — for instance, due to burns or skin cancer — potential candidates must also be kidney transplant patients.
Such individuals are already taking the immunosuppressive drugs required to decrease the risk of rejection in the facial procedure, which means they have intimate knowledge of the drugs’ considerable effects. The advance experience is essential because face transplant recipients have to take drugs for the rest of their lives to prevent complications.
Although the face transplant team at Brigham and Women’s Hospital could be prepared to start performing surgeries within a matter of weeks, the bigger issue is locating patients who meet all of the preliminary requirements. As a result, it’s not likely the procedure will occur in the near future. When it does, however, you can count on the captivating news spreading faster than wildfire.
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