New Delhi: A team of plastic and reconstructive surgeons at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi, India’s premier health facility, is gearing up to offer face transplants, one of the rarest surgeries performed anywhere in the world. Face transplantation is a highly sophisticated procedure that has the potential to transform the life of a person with severe face deformities. It involves replacement of all or part of the face with donor tissue from someone who has died or is brain dead.
The world’s first partial face transplantation on a living person was carried out in France in 2005 while the first full face transplant was completed in Spain in 2010. But so far, under 50 successful face transplantations have been carried out globally, and only select hospitals in the US, France, Spain, and Turkey — the only Asian country on that list — offer the complex surgery. Sources in AIIMS, New Delhi, told ThePrint that surgeons from the institute will start undergoing training this year by performing dummy face transplants.
This may be three to four years before the institute starts offering the service to actual patients. These dummy surgeries may involve transplanting a face from a cadaver to another. “Even though we are a government institute, tremendous work is happening at our centre in terms of offering complicated cosmetic procedures.
Moreover, face transplant is something that we are keen to start in the coming years,” a senior doctor in th.