Jérôme Hamon, the first man in the world to have undergone two face transplants, in 2010 and 2018, and who thus had three different faces during his life, died this week at the age of 49, he said. we learned Thursday from consistent sources. ” He is dead. He was exhausted by the end. A week ago I exchanged text messages with him,” said Franck Zal, close to the family and doctor in marine biology, confirming information from Telegram. His company developed technology that made it possible to perform the 2018 transplant.
“I want to testify to Jérôme’s strength, I asked him how he managed to resist all this. I am very affected,” added the scientist. On the newspaper website West France, the death notice specifies that Jérôme Hamon died at the age of 49 and that his funeral will take place on Friday in Saint-Thégonnec (Finistère). The 2018 transplant was carried out by the team of Professor Laurent Lantieri, at the Georges-Pompidou European Hospital, of the Assistance publique-Hôpitaux de Paris (AP-HP).
A second transplant because of a common cold
This plastic surgeon had already performed a first total face transplant on the same patient in 2010 at the Henri-Mondor hospital in Créteil. Jérôme Hamon suffered from neurofibromatosis type 1 (von Recklinghausen disease), a genetic disease which had distorted his face. The first transplant had been a success, as he recounted in a book published in April 2015, “Did you see the Monsieur? “.
But, the same year, during a common cold, he was treated with an antibiotic incompatible with his immunosuppressive treatment. In 2016 he started showing signs of chronic rejection, and his face deteriorated. In the summer of 2017 he was hospitalized, and in November, his transplanted face, which showed areas of necrosis, had to be removed. He will remain “faceless” for two months in intensive care at Pompidou, while the Biomedicine Agency identifies a compatible donor.
The face donor will be a young man of 22, who died several hundred kilometers from Paris. “His dream was to work again, he was a book lover, but he was tired, he was not able to work again (after his 2018 transplant),” said Franck Zal, specifying that Jérôme Hamon lived in Finistère.