Opening a new frontier in transplant surgery, Texas doctors have done the world’s first partial skull and scalp transplant to help a man who suffered a large head wound from cancer treatment.
Doctors from Houston Methodist Hospital and MD Anderson Cancer Center did the operation two weeks ago.
The recipient — Jim Boysen, a 55-year-old software developer from Austin — was expected to leave the hospital Thursday with a new kidney and pancreas along with the scalp and skull grafts. He said he was stunned at how well doctors matched him to a donor with similar skin and hair coloring.
“It’s kind of shocking, really, how good they got it. I will have way more hair than when I was 21,” Boysen joked.
Last year, doctors in the Netherlands said they replaced most of a woman’s skull with a 3-D printed plastic one. The Texas operation is thought to be the first skull-scalp transplant from a human donor, as opposed to an artificial implant or a simple bone graft.
