Innovative Pediatric Hand Transplant Program At Boston Children's Hospital Begins

Boston Children's Hospital announced that they're starting a pediatric hand transplant program. Surgeons are actively looking for kids who need, well, a hand.

The Harvard-affiliated pediatric hand transplant program will be the first in the world. The first adult hand transplant was in 1964 in Ecuador. They were unsuccessful until 1998, but now, hand transplants in adults have become fairly routine. There have been more than 70 completed, and a handful of academic medical centers, such as those at the UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Mayo Clinic, perform hand transplants.

This progress has encouraged doctors in Boston to consider their own pediatric hand transplant program.

That steady progress prompted doctors at Boston Children's Hospital to consider making the surgery available to younger patients, said

"It has been shown in adults that hand transplants can be safe and effective; the time is right to bring this to a younger population," Dr. William Harmon, medical director of the new program, said in a statement.

While hand transplants are complex, sometimes taking up to twice as long as a heart transplant, Harmon believes kids may be at an advantage.

"We know from experience that kids can regenerate nerves better than adults and believe that their immature immune systems can learn to adapt to a transplant successfully," he said.

Children haven't received hand transplants from unrelated donors yet, and the only known case involved a one-month-old girl born with a deformed left arm in Malaysia. She received a new arm from her identical twin sister, who died at birth.

The Boston Children's Hospital Hand Transplant Program is looking for children to pilot the program who have been without both hands for a year and are in good overall health. They may also consider candidates with only one hand that functions poorly, or children with one well-functioning hand who are already taking immunosuppression drugs due to another transplant operation.

"We hope that for some children, hand transplants will improve their quality of life, allowing them the ability to be more independent and perform daily tasks - tasks that many of us take for granted," Dr. Amir Taghinia, the program's surgical director, said.