Major Facial Disfigurement/Transplants

Factual Questions
1

I was watching a show on Discovery about some people with really messed up faces and surguries they are going through to try and mitigate their horrible appearence. It got me thinking if a donated partial or full face could be transplanted to the sufferer. Burn victims get thin skin transplants already so does that mean there is little or no rejection of the foreign tissue? Linking up a blood supply to the new skin doesn’t seem like it would be impossible and maybe even nerve and muscles as well? It sounds very daunting but not impossible… or am I missing something?

2
3

Rejection is still the major obstacle. Foreign tissue requires anti-rejection drugs or, eventually, you’ll lose the tissue and you’ll be back to square one (or worse).

The anti-rejection drugs, in addition to lowering your immune system function, can also have serious side effects, like organ damage. Many people feel that they should be administered only for life-threatening conditions and, according to some, lacking a face, while horrificly disfiguring, isn’t life-threatening enough. Yeah, easy enough for someone of normal appearance to say - it’s not much of a life if you’re hiding from public view.

Aside from the rejection thing - yes, hooking up the blood vessels and even muscles and nerves is technically feasible these days.

4

A lot of these transplants are self-donated. Doctors take patches of skin from the thigh or other body parts that can spare them and graft them onto the parts that need them. It can be tricky to match the texture and color well, and scarring is not insignificant, but at least the body recognizes the tissue as “belonging”. Generally, when a burn is fresh, the first priority it just keeping it covered and clean to prevent infection. Only once the patient is stabilized do they worry about making it look nice. Sometimes they can do pretty amazing work, though. My mother suffered third degree burns over 70% of her body as a child (a sparkler set her polyester dress on fire), but you’d never know it to look at her today.

A donated face might be possible to attach, but it won’t look like the donor’s face. Very little of how a face looks is from the skin - most of it is from the underlying musculature and bone structure. There were a few articles decrying the bad science in Face/Off years ago: there’s just no way John Travolta and Nicholas Cage would ever look like each other without major breaking and resetting of bones and stripping of muscle.