LONDON — In a medical first, a French surgeon says he has performed asecond face transplant on the same patient — who is now doing well and evenspent a recent weekend in Brittany.
Dr. Laurent Lantieri of the Georges Pompidou hospital in Paris firsttransplanted a new face onto Jerome Hamon in 2010, when Hamon was in hismid-30s. But after getting ill in 2015, Hamon was given drugs thatinterfered with the anti-rejection medicines he was taking for his facetransplant.
Last November, the tissue in his transplanted face began to die, leadingLantieri to remove it.
That left Hamon without a face, a condition that Lantieri described as “thewalking dead.” Hamon had no eyelids, no ears, no skin and could not speakor eat. He had limited hearing and could express himself only by turninghis head slightly, in addition to writing a little.
“If you have no skin, you have infections,” Lantieri told The AssociatedPress on Tuesday. “We were very concerned about the possibility of a newrejection.”
In January, when a second face donor for Hamon became available, Lantieriand his team performed a second face transplant. But before undergoing thesecond transplant, doctors had to replace all of the blood in his body in amonthlong procedure, to eliminate some potentially worrisome antibodiesfrom previous treatments.
“For a man who went through all this, which is like going through a nuclearwar, he’s doing fine,” Lantieri said. He added that Hamon is now beingmonitored like any other face transplant patient.
Hamon’s first face was donated by a 60-year-old. With his secondtransplanted face, Hamon said he managed to drop a few decades.
“I’m 43. The donor was 22. So I’ve become 20 years younger,” Hamon joked onFrench television Tuesday.
Other doctors applauded the French team’s efforts and said the techniquescould be used to help critically ill patients with few options.
“The fact that Professor Lantieri was able to save this patient gives ushope that other patients can have a backup surgery if necessary,” said Dr.Frank Papay, of the Cleveland Clinic. He said the techniques beingdeveloped by Lantieri and others could help doctors achieve what he called”the holy grail” of transplant medicine: how to allow patients to toleratetissue transplants from others.
Dr. Bohdan Pomahac of Harvard University, who has done face transplants inthe U.S., said similar procedures would ultimately become more common, withrising numbers of patients.