Study Status: Completed
Recruit Status: Unknown status
Study Type: Interventional
Official Title: Allogenic Vascularized Knee and Femur Transplantation Clinical Evaluation
Brief Summary:
High energy trauma often results in severe soft tissue, bone and joint injury. Today, many methods and techniques exist to treat theses severely injured extremities. Surgical techniques include open reduction and internal fixation (ORIF), e.g. with screws and plates, soft tissue reconstruction by local or free flaps and joint reconstruction by arthroplasty, e.g. total knee arthroplasty. In few, very severe cases, those methods are not sufficient to restore function and amputation is the only option left.
In 1908 the German surgeon Erich Lexer had the idea to transplant a joint. Due to the medical situation at his time the attempts failed.
But the idea survived and was processed over the time. Transplant surgery and medicine developed, immunosuppressive drugs were established and animal models proved that bone and joint transplantation is technically feasible.
In 1998 the first successful hand and in 2005 the first partial face transplantation was carried out. In 1996 we started our clinical femur and knee joint transplantation project.