Face Transplantation 2005 – The Changing Face of Life

In May 2005, Isabelle Dinoire fell to the floor after taking a sedative, and her dog mauled her face.

  "When I woke up, I tried to light a cigarette and could not understand why it would not stay between my lips. That was when I saw the pool of blood and the dog beside it! I went to look at myself in the mirror... It was horrifying."

To give Dinoire a new face, a team led by French surgeons Bernard Devauchelle and Jean-Michel Dubernerd performed the world's first partial face transplant in 2005. They successfully transplanted the nose, lips, and chin of another woman who had died by suicide onto Dinoire.

Until recently, the idea of transplanting an entire face or hands between genetically different people seemed an impossible challenge. These composite tissue allotransplantations (CTAs) require modern immunosuppressants to prevent the recipient's tissues from rejecting the donor tissue, and involve connecting many blood vessels and nerves. Unlike solid-organ allografts such as liver transplants, a face transplant can involve many different tissues, including muscles, tendons, nerves, bones, blood vessels, and skin, making tissue rejection a greater challenge.

Since Dinoire's face transplant, many different face transplants have been performed, some involving larger facial areas, tear ducts, and eyelids. In the United States in 2008, Connie Culp, whose husband had shot her in the face, received a face transplant that included most of the nasal sinuses, the upper jaw, and even teeth from a brain-dead donor. Face transplant recipients must take antirejection drugs for life, but they may regain movement of the facial muscles and sensation in the skin. However, the transplanted face does not resemble the donor's face because of differences in the underlying bone structure between donor and recipient.

Description of the Article Image: From left to right: Isabelle Dinoire, Connie Culp, and Uğur Acar, who received Turkey's first face transplant in 2012.

Historical Figures Mentioned in This Article: Jean-Michel Dubernerd (b. 1941), Bernard Devauchelle (b. 1950)

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