Woman has nose grown on her arm before having it successfully transplanted onto her face
9 November 2022, 15:21
A woman had a new nose grown on her arm by surgeons in France, who went on to successfully graft it to her face in a groundbreaking operation.
The patient in Toulouse lost a large part of her nose after being treated for nasal cavity cancer in 2013 with radiotherapy and chemotherapy.
She spent years living without the majority of her nose, trying prosthetics and enduring a skin graft to try to correct it.
However surgeons from Toulouse University Hospital, and the Claudius Regaud Institute, used cutting-edge techniques to perform the groundbreaking treatment at the Toulouse-Oncopole University Cancer Institute.
Read more: Hundreds of thousands of nurses to go on strike at the end of the year over pay dispute
A new nose was grown on her arm from a custom biomaterial, used to replace the lost cartilage.
It was 3D printed into a shape based on images of her nose from before her treatment began. Surgeons then implanted it onto her forearm where skin from her temple was grown over it. After two months growing on her arm, the nose was transplanted onto her face.
Surgeons connected blood vessels that had formed in the arm’s skin to blood vessels on the woman’s face.
The woman was said to be doing “Very well” after 10 days of hospitalisation and three weeks of antibiotics.
The hospital said: “This type of reconstruction had never before been performed on such a fragile and poorly vascularised area and was made possible thanks to the collaboration of the medical teams with the company Cerhum, a Belgian manufacturer of medical devices specializing in bone reconstruction.
“This new technique also makes it possible to overcome certain limitations presented by other techniques.”
