On the cusp of new transplant era
Transplant surgery is entering an era of new complexity, where complex surgeries will become standardized and the goal will be restoration of pre-injury form and function rather than merely reconstruction, the surgeon who led Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s face transplant team said Monday. Bohdan Pomahac, director of plastic surgery transplantation at the Brigham and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, said that today’s surgeons owe a debt to those who came before, as long ago as World War I, when surgeons used tissue from other parts of the body to rebuild facial structure lost through burns, injury, or wounds. Though those tissues saved lives and allowed some function, they fell far short of a complete restoration to what existed pre-trauma. Patients lived, but were often disfigured. “They had to use tissues that don’t belong to the face, that don’t look like the face, and shouldn’t be there,” Pomahac said. Even as earlier organ transplants...