World's First Skull-Cap Transplant Helps Jim Boysen Fight Cancer

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, Texas - expects 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 in an interview with The Associated Press. 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. Boysen had a kidney-pancreas transplant in 1992 to treat diabetes he has had since age 5 and has been on drugs to prevent organ rejection. The immune suppression drugs raise the risk of cancer, and he developed a rare type - leiomyosarcoma (lee-oh-my-oh-sar-KOHM-ah). It can affect many types of smooth muscles but in his case, it was the ones under the scalp that make your hair stand on end when something gives you the creeps. Radiation therapy for the cancer destroyed part of h...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news