Texas doctors successfully complete world's first skull-scalp transplant

Texas doctors say they have succesfully completed the world's first partial skull and scalp transplant to help a man left with a large head wound following treatment for a rare form of cancer.

MD Anderson Cancer Center and Houston Methodist Hospital doctors announced the breakthrough Thursday, stating that they did the operation on May 22 at Houston Methodist.

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 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 of tumor, leiomyosarcoma.

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 as part of the sympathetic nervous system's fight-or-flight response.

Radiation therapy for the cancer destroyed part of his head, immune suppression drugs kept his body from repairing the damage, and his transplanted organs were starting to fail - "a perfect storm that made the wound not heal," Boysen said.

Yet doctors could not perform a new kidney-pancreas transplant as long as he had an open wound. That's when Dr. Jesse Selber, a reconstructive plastic surgeon at MD Anderson, thought of giving him a new partial skull and scalp at the same time as new organs as a solution to all of his problems.

Houston Methodist, which has transplant expertise, partnered on the venture. It took 18 months for the organ procurement organization, LifeGift, to find the right donor, who provided all organs for Boysen and was not identified.

The Associated Press