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Full-face transplant 'on cards'
18/06/2006 21:49 - (SA)
London - Just a few months after pioneering partial face transplants in China and France, a London hospital is set to give the go-ahead for a surgeon to conduct the world's first full-face transplant.
Peter Butler, a consultant plastic surgeon at the Royal Free Hospital in north London, has been contacted by 29 disfigured volunteers willing to undergo the procedure, reported major British newspapers on Sunday.
The hospital's ethical committee is expected to announce on Wednesday that it will approve the first operations, according to the Observer newspaper.
"My aim is not to be first, but to do it on the right patient," Butler was quoted as saying.
Lengthy selection process
"It would be very dangerous to look at it as a race because it could harm the patient and (the reputation of) the procedure," he told the Sunday Times.
A spokesperson for the Royal Free Hospital, declined to comment until the green light was given.
A spokesperson for the doctor said approval did not mean that someone would be getting an all-new face imminently, as the patient-selection process could take up to a year.
"There is a meeting of the ethical committee that will consider the next stage in the process," he said.
"What they will be discussing is the form of the operation and whether that operation is right to go ahead.
"After that, we still have got to find a panel of four to five patients, before an operation can be considered."
One potential candidate is reported to be a 22-year-old who was badly burned as a child.
Last year, surgeons in France carried out the world's first partial face transplant.
Isabelle Dinoire, 38, had her nose, lips and chin replaced after being savaged by a dog.
In April, a hospital in China conducted what is believed to be the second partial face transplant on Li Guoxing, 30.
Butler's 30-strong team have spent 10 years studying face transplants.
He said: "We don't know how people will react. Does the government want us to go ahead with this? We just don't know.
"But a huge amount of work has been done with the group of patients who might benefit from this surgery.
"Many of them have disfiguring injuries and spend their lives indoors, so, for them, this is not just life-enhancing surgery, it is life-saving because it gives them back the chance to join society."
'You have to make the leap'
Butler said he would rather perform the operation on four or five people to give it more "scientific validity" rather than on one person who would become "a phenomenon".
"I feel the time is right to move on," Butler said.
"You can do more and more research but at some point the leap has to be made, and people have to say, 'OK, we've done our preparation, let's get behind this'."
A thorough face-change operation would involve removing eight different blood vessels, four arteries and four veins from the donor and attaching them to the patient's face by re-connecting the tissue.
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