Texas doctors do world's first skull-scalp transplant

Opening a new frontier in transplant surgery, Texas doctors have done the world's first partial skull and scalp transplant to help a man who suffered a large head wound from cancer treatment.

Doctors from Houston Methodist Hospital and MD Anderson Cancer Center did the operation.

The recipient -- Jim Boysen, a 55-year-old software developer from Austin, Texas -- expected to leave the hospital with a new kidney and pancreas, along with the scalp and skull grafts.

He said he was stunned at how well doctors matched him to a donor with similar skin and hair coloring.

"It's kind of shocking, really, how good they got it. I will have way more hair than when I was 21," Boysen joked in an interview with The Associated Press.

Last year, doctors in the Netherlands said they replaced most of a woman's skull with a 3-D printed plastic one.

The Texas operation is thought to be the first skull-scalp transplant from a human donor, as opposed to an artificial implant or a simple bone graft.

Boysen had a kidney-pancreas transplant in 1992 to treat diabetes he has had since age 5 and has been on drugs to prevent organ rejection.

The immune suppression drugs raise the risk of cancer, and he developed a rare type -- leiomyosarcoma.

Radiation therapy for the cancer destroyed part of his head, immune suppression drugs kept his body from repairing the damage, and his transplanted organs were starting to fail -- "a perfect storm that made the wound not heal," Boysen said.

Doctors could not perform a new kidney-pancreas transplant as long as he had an open wound. That's when Dr. Jesse Selber, a reconstructive plastic surgeon at MD Anderson, thought of giving him a new partial skull and scalp at the same time as new organs.