“In 2021, James was injured in an electrical accident while working as a high-voltage lineman. He lost his dominant left arm, left eye, chin and nose. For two years, he was unable to eat solid food, taste, smell or talk normally. In May 2023, he received the world’s first whole-eye and face transplant in an operation at New York University (NYU) Langone Health in New York City. More than a year after the surgery, his transplanted eye remains healthy — the retina can even respond to light — but James cannot see out of it,” reports Nature:
A large medical team transplanted the whole left eye, the bony socket around it, the nose, a piece of chin bone and the associated muscles, nerves and blood vessels to James from a donor whose brain showed no functional activity. The surgery took about 21 hours.
Doctors never expected James to regain sight in the transplanted eye…That’s because there was no evidence that the donor’s optic nerve could successfully reconnect to James’s brain. The optic nerve, which sends information from the retina to the brain, is part of the central nervous system, and how to regenerate that system is a mystery. But the operation does take researchers a step closer to an eye transplant that could one day restore vision, which…has been ‘considered a holy grail’.
In other news, a woman received her sister’s womb in the first womb transplant in the United Kingdom. “The recipient was a 34-year-old woman, and the donor her 40-year-old sister.” The recipient “has several embryos in storage, waiting to be” implanted. “A team of more than 30 carried out the procedures, lasting around 17 hours.” The recipient’s “sister already had two children and had completed her family.”… the recipient “is hoping that she can go on to have not one but two babies. Her womb is functioning perfectly.” The BBC says that
The woman had her first period two weeks after the surgery. Like other transplant patients, she needs to take immunosuppressive drugs to prevent tissue rejection. These carry some long-term health risks, so the uterus will be removed after a maximum of two pregnancies.
She was born with a rare condition, Type 1 Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser (MRKH) where the uterus is absent or underdeveloped, but has functioning ovaries. Prior to surgery she had fertility treatment with her husband, and they have eight embryos in storage….The NHS costs, estimated at £25,000, were paid for by the charity Womb Transplant UK. More than 30 staff involved on the day gave their time for free.
A monkey survived for two years on a gene-edited pig-kidney transplant.
Doctors recently did the first robotic liver transplant in America. Robots can fit in small spaces in people’s bodies that a surgeon can’t reach without cutting through living tissue, or doing other collateral damage.
