Did you know that a Belgian had participated to the first face transplant in the world?

A Belgian, Benoît Lengelé, is known throughout the world for having performed, with other surgeons, the first face transplant in France. In 2005, for the first time in the world, a French and Belgian surgical team performed a partial face transplant in a 38 years old woman. The patient had been disfigured by dog’s bites which caused a tearing of both lips and part of the nose.

That's not all ! Did you know that this technique was elaborated in a Belgian laboratory?

The entire design of this transplant was elaborated in the laboratory of experimental morphology of Professor Benoît Lengelé at the Cliniques universitaires Saint-Luc (UCL-St-Luc) in Brussels!

But concretely, what is a face graft?

This transplant is only possible when the patient was severely disfigured. To do so, they use tissues from the face of a deceased donor. This transplant can be partial, replacing for example, the nose, the lips and the chin, or total, the entire face. The tissues taken from the donor are grafted to the patients without modification. 

This technique differs from the traditional reconstructive surgery that uses silicone prostheses or living tissue extracted from the patient’s body.