Doctors learning new details about face transplant

January 19, 2006

This is the man who's at the center of it all -- Matt Scott, who got a hand transplant in Louisville seven years ago. This is what doctors do when they meet him: "They walk up to me and shake my right hand and immediately want to shake my left hand when they leave."

They're checking the color, the texture, the function of his transplanted hand. They are among the world's leading scientists meeting in Tucson to focus on the next medical frontier: face transplants.

These sessions are closed to the public and the media because they're talking about things like the progress and complications in patients like Matt Scott who have had composite tissue allotransplantation.

The symposium was sponsored by the Louisville team of surgeons who've performed the nation's only two hand transplants. Now they're ready to start work on transplanting parts of the face.

The only physician in the U.S. with approval to do face transplants is Dr. Maria Siemionow, whose team at the Cleveland Clinic is ready to move from the bench to the bedside.

"We have done vast work on rats on facial transplantation and a large series of cadaver transplantations," she says.

There was also news out of this seminar about the patient in France who got the first facial transplant. She had an episode of rejection about three weeks after her surgery, but it was treated with medication and she's OK. She's also being allowed to go out in public, at first with a mask, but now she's out shopping, going to bars and she says no one notices anything different without the mask.

Armed with new information and new medications, Louisville surgeons are ready to move on to a new era in organ transplantation.

Copyright © 2006 Belo Kentucky Inc.

This article posted February 15, 2006.