TRANSPLANTING faces may seem like science fiction, but doctors say the experimental surgery could one day become routine.
In papers from two of the world's three teams that have performed partial face transplants, experts said their techniques were surprisingly effective, though complications exist and work is still needed.
The research was published yesterday in Bri
tish medical journal the Lancet.
"There is no reason to think these face transplants would not be as common as kidney or liver transplants one day," said Dr Laurent Lantieri, a plastic surgeon at the Henri Mondor-Albert Chenevier Hospital in Paris and one of the doctors who operated on a man severely disfigured by a genetic disease.
In this week's journal, he and colleagues reported on their patient's status one year after the transplant and Chinese doctors reported on their patient, two years after his surgery.
In 2007, Dr Lantieri and his team operated on a 29-year-old man with tumours that blurred his features in a face that looked almost monstrous. They transplanted a new lower face from a donor, giving the patient recognisable cheeks, a nose and mouth. Six months later, he could smile and blink.
The Chinese patient had part of his face ripped off by a bear. Surgeons gave him a new nose, upper lip and cheek. After a few months, he could eat, drink and talk normally.
In both cases, the patients' faces rejected the transplanted tissue more than once and doctors solved the problem by juggling their medications. The French patient now takes three pills a day to prevent rejection. "That's less than most people with diabetes," Dr Lantieri said.
Other doctors were reassured by the results. "To be able to wean down the dosage of the medication in small amounts and relatively quickly, that is encouraging," said Dr Bohdan Pomahac, a plastic surgeon at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, in the United States.
Dr Pomahac has permission to do a transplant in the US, and was not involved in either the French or Chinese operations.
Experts have worried that if transplant patients take lifelong anti-rejection drugs, their risk of cancer will jump.
Some have also predicted that rejection would eventually destroy the face. Those fears seem to have been allayed, Dr Pomahac said. He added that partial face transplants could become relatively common in the future, but that more people would probably need new kidneys or livers rather than a new face.
With three successful partial face transplants so far – including the world's first, of a woman whose face was bitten off by a dog in France – doctors say that some of the surgery's initial uncertainties, such as how functional the new face would be, are being answered.
For example, Dr Lantieri's patient's face was paralysed for more than a decade. The surgeon and his team were unsure if nerves could grow after the transplant. But they discovered later their patient could blink, proving that the brain was able to restore long-forgotten facial nerve connections.
Not everyone is convinced that face transplants are so revolutionary. Dr Patrick Warnke, a plastic surgeon at the University of Kiel in Germany, calls them a "dead-end road" because he does not believe the rejection problem can be solved in the long term. Instead, he hopes to re-grow tissue from patients' own stem cells.
But the biggest obstacle to more face transplants may not be scientific, but social.
"When kidney transplants first began, people were reluctant to donate because there were a lot of cultural, social and religious issues," Dr Pomahac said. "This is exactly the same scenario now."
Doctors plan to do more face transplants but are having a hard time finding donors.
"Everyone says they would accept a face transplant if they were disfigured," Dr Lantieri said. "The real question is, would you be a donor, or would you allow your family member to donate their face? That is the answer we need to change."
The full article contains 670 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
