Face Transplant

A face transplant, or facial transplant, is a medical procedure in which a significant portion of facial tissue, typically taken from a deceased donor, is grafted onto a recipient's face. It is a form of vascularized composite tissue allotransplantation, a surgical technique that transplants multiple types of tissue together as a functional unit, and may involve grafting skin, lips, facial musculature, sensory nerves and, in some cases, underlying facial bones such as those of the nose; recipients require lifelong immunosuppressive therapy to prevent rejection of the transplanted tissue. The first successful partial face transplant on a living person was performed on Isabelle Dinoire in November 2005 at the Amiens-Picardie University Hospital in France, a fifteen hour operation that transplanted a triangular graft of nose, lips and chin from a deceased donor onto a woman who had suffered a traumatic facial injury earlier that year. The first full face transplant was completed in Spain in March 2010, by a team at the Vall d'Hebron University Hospital in Barcelona, across several procedures, and by 2025 an estimated fifty facial transplants had been performed worldwide, with Turkey, France, the United States and Spain considered the leading countries in performing and researching the procedure.