Penis transplantation

Penis transplantation
Intervention
ICD-9-CM	64.98
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Penis transplantation is a surgical transplant procedure in which a penis is transplanted to a patient. The penis may be an allograft from a human donor, or it may be grown artificially, though the latter has not yet been transplanted onto a human.

The first such procedure was performed in September 2006 at a military hospital in Guangzhou, China. The patient, a 44-year-old male, had sustained the loss of most of his penis in an accident. The transplanted penis came from a brain-dead 22-year-old male. Although a surgical success, the patient and his wife suffered psychological trauma as a result of the procedure, and had the surgery reversed 15 days later. Following this, Jean-Michel Dubernard, who performed the world's first face transplant, wrote that the case "raises many questions and has some critics". He alluded to a double standard, writing:

I cannot imagine what would have been the reactions of the medical profession, ethics specialists, and the media if a European surgical team had performed the same operation.

An example of a critic is Piet Hoebeke, a reconstructive urologist in Belgium, who wrote a letter that raised the question of whether or not ethics committees were involved, and criticized the group for the follow-up time of only 15 days. Hoebeke asserted that successful voiding at two weeks is not predictive of long-term outcomes, and even that inadequate arterial anastomoses might not manifest themselves in this time. The hospital that performed the first transplantation later issued a set of guidelines which, among other considerations, "recommended that the procedure be restricted to individuals with severe injuries who are unwilling to undergo traditional reconstructive surgery", according to a mini-review of the ethical issues surrounding penis transplantation published in the Asian Journal of Andrology.

In 2008, Anthony Atala and colleagues at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in North Carolina transplanted bioengineered penises onto 12 rabbits. All of them mated and four produced offspring. It was a test for a concept he had been working on since 1992, with the aim of making human penises for transplant. He has produced test versions of bioengineered human penises, but none of them are suitable for transplantation yet.

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