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Full face transplant in future?
16/12/2005 23:42 - (SA)
London - British doctors hoping to perform the world's first full face transplant have been given permission to identify a suitable patient, it was announced on Thursday.
The ethics committee at the public Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, north London, gave the go-ahead to consultant plastic surgeon Peter Butler and his team to identify a potential recipient.
The development comes just weeks after a 38-year-old French woman was given the world's first partial face transplant after being disfigured in a dog attack.
Butler, who has been researching the process - and potential tissue rejection - for more than 10 years, said the likely patient will have suffered severe facial burns or trauma and already received a number of skin grafts.
"Quite a lot of issues around patient selection are not only physical but psychological. This is the most significant part of the process," he explained.
"Identifying the right patient is the key to the procedure and is definitely the hardest part, rather than the actual operation."
Unlikey to recognise the deceased's face
Further ethical approval will be needed once the patient has been selected, and Butler could encounter resistance from Britain's Royal College of Surgeons.
The organisation said in a 2003 report it believed it "unwise" to proceed and called for further research.
But Butler - who claimed he had found a majority of people in favour of the procedure, particularly among those who knew someone with a facial deformity - said that work had taken place and it was now right to begin the process.
Computer simulations also showed that donor families were unlikely to recognise their deceased relative's face on the recipient, he added.
Andrew Way, chief executive of the Royal Free Hospital, said: "We are delighted that Peter Butler and the team are continuing to make steady progress towards identifying patients suitable for face transplant.
"The team has been working on an assessment tool for patients seeking face transplants and has now been given permission to identify patients using this tool. Further ethical approval is required to ensure the patient can give appropriate consent.
"Much painstaking work has been done and still needs to be done before we will see the first face transplant, but we are determined to do this the way we think is right and will not be rushed into anything because of what teams in other countries are doing."
- AFP
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