The Boston Children’s Hospital seeks for children more than 10 years old who had lost their hands for over a year. They also accept those who had lost only one hand as long as the other one is not functioning properly anymore. Volunteers will be subject for the world’s first pediatric hand transplant.
Dr. Amir Taghinia and Dr. William Harmon will supervise the program that aims to perform hand transplants to children in order to improve their lives and perform tasks that those with hands can do. The program is a difficult surgery that requires the best team they can have. The patients will also undergo extensive therapy after the surgery and maintenance. Volunteers will need to prove that they are healthy enough to qualify for the surgery that is why everyone will go through detailed screening evaluation.
Hand transplant is already available for adults but this experimental surgery is the first for children. However, they were hopeful that the program will be successful since children are known to regenerate nerves faster than adults.
“It has been shown in adults that hand transplants can be safe and effective; the time is right to bring this to a younger population,” Harmon said in a statement to Boston Business Journal. “We know from experience that kids can regenerate nerves better than adults and believe that their immature immune systems can learn to adapt to a transplant successfully.”
If this will be successful, the possibility of transplants on children can spread out on other organs such as heart, liver, kidney, intestine, and others.
There was a successful attempt to perform pediatric hand transplant before in Malaysia but they were genetically the same since the donor was the twin of the recipient. However, Boston’s attempt is different because the donors and the recipients are not related to each other.
