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Italians Perform Groundbreaking Full Jaw Transplant

Posted by timothy on from the jawing-is-a-verb-after-all dept.

statikuz writes "According to BBC News, Italian surgeons have performed the world's first complete jaw transplant. In eleven hours, the surgeons replaced a man's cancer-ridden jaw with a bone from a deceased donor; the donated jawbone was sterlized and stored at -196C to fight rejection, and "The current patient is said to be doing well.", says Professor Giuseppe Spriano, leader of the surgery team at the Regina Elena hospital in Rome."

1 of 37 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why organic? by Sir+Holo · · Score: 5, Informative

    Why does a jawbone need to be organic? Couldn't an artificial one be made of titanium or something?

    It can. My dentist was installing metal (I think titanium) jaw part replacements into guys wounded in Vietnam. The problem is that the thermal and mechaincal properties of bone and titanium (or any metal) are very different. This leads to a lot of pain with slight temperature changes, mechanical shock like chewing, and so on. It's best to replace body parts using materials that are as similar as possible to the original. You can't get much closer that bone-for-bone.