New approaches to antibody therapy

Abstract

The past years have seen the emergence of a new field in plastic surgery: composite tissue allotransplantation (CTA). While it has been used differently depending on context, CTA generally applies to the allotransplantation of vascularized tissues for the purpose of tissue reconstruction. While CTA has been performed for a few decades now (vascularized tendon and bone allotransplants were performed in select experimental settings as early as the 1980s and 1990s), the holy grail of CTA - the transplantation of vascularized tissues that contain a skin component - was achieved only recently (September 23, 1998) with the first human hand transplantation in Lyon (France).