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Experts Study Hand, Face Transplant Drugs

Posted on: Tuesday, 6 July 2004, 06:00 CDT

PITTSBURGH - Researchers are studying antirejection drugs as a recent interest in hand transplants increases the possibility that a face transplant could be conducted soon.

Dr. W.P. Andrew Lee, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's chief of plastic surgery, said it's a matter of when, not if, face transplants will be performed on humans. But since powerful anti-rejection drugs could hurt someone's chances of survival, Lee and others are studying how to wean transplant recipients from the drugs, or at least lower the doses of them.

"As many as 88 percent of organ transplant recipients receive some type of opportunistic infection," Lee told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

Face transplants are getting attention across the world. At the University of Louisville, officials are likely to seek permission soon from its Institutional Review Board to transplant a face from a cadaver to a living recipient. The University of Louisville had done cadaver-to-cadaver face transplants, university spokeswoman Kathy Keadle said.

And researchers in England and France are also discussing the possibility of performing the complicated surgeries, which involve transplanting skin, muscles, fat, blood vessels and nerves.

Lee said face transplants make sense because surgeons can't adequately rebuild the face's of people who have been disfigured. Many times, tissue and other things are transplanted from elsewhere on someone's body, but the results are usually not perfect.

Lee said researchers have transplanted limbs on rats and pigs, and the animals have successfully lived without anti-rejection drugs for as long as a year.

Arthur Caplan, chairman of the department of medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, said face transplants have raise many serious ethical questions.

"It's one thing to say your heart is rejecting and you're going to die within seconds. If your face is sloughing off your body - can you imagine? It's a nightmare," Caplan said.

Caplan and Lee agree that more animal studies are needed before face transplants become a reality. In particular, Caplan said there needs to be a national policy on them, and the psychological and social ramifications need to be thought through.

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Information from: Tribune-Review, http://www.triblive.com

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