8-year-old Zion Harvey gets a Double Hand Transplant

It was just announced today that 8-year old Zion Harvey became the world’s youngest recipient of a double hand transplant earlier this month. The surgery took place at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and was led by director L. Scott Levin, MD, FACS.

I found the story inspiring, but was not overly impressed with the science. We have read about a few dozen successful double hand transplant cases in recent years, so this was not a total surprise. Moreover, I have covered numerous other medical miracles in my once-a-month brief updates posts on this blog. e.g., a full scalp and skull transplant.

Most organ transplant cases are no longer a big surprise to me, even though they probably should be.

The Zion Harvey Story

Then I read that little Zion also has prosthetic legs. Apparently, he lost both his hands and feet at the age of 2 due to a sepsis infection. Then I read that he also had a kidney transplant from his mother at the age of 4 after two years of dialysis! This now makes this whole story an absolute miracle. After I saw the below videos on Zion, I had no choice but to immediately write a post about him, even though I never write two blog posts in one day.

In Zion’s case, acquiring donor hands that were a match was challenging and took some time. The surgical team had to consider factors such as blood type, size, skin color and gender. Dr. Levin estimated that no more than 15 potential donors per year are available in the US for such requests.

A three-year update from 2014 on the world’s first double hand transplant recipient is quite encouraging. An article on early stage prosthesis from the late 1800s was also published three days ago and is worth a read. Compare with prosthetics of today and we really do have a bionic revolution coming.

Also check out the new update from August 26, 2015.

12 thoughts on “8-year-old Zion Harvey gets a Double Hand Transplant”

    1. Yes I read about it before, but I had already made the post on Kerastem and just updated it instead of writing a new post on that so soon.

  1. Good find egg head. Do you know how long this trial will take to complete? I see Ken washinik is involved, hopefully he won’t fail this time. That whole Aderans was a huge disappointment. If he was successful in that we all would be a much better hair condition. I am still not getting my hopes up for this till I see good before and after pics on the news.

    1. I googled androgenic alopecia and clicked on news, theres 2 pages with stock info, and results pics, i think if i remember correctly there are 8 phase 2 locations for trials. they have plenty of info on their page

    1. they don’t look good or bad to me, kerastem.com front page .. it’s autologous so… not sure but this might be as good as it get’s from the autologous / replicel / christiano / terkish / injection department.. I’m not sure if histogen or any of the above can provide any better results than this.. i have no idea not the intelligent one here

  2. Results are ok. Good for filling in some density on low Norwoods. It seems this procedure is already avaliable in Europe at their clinics. Am I reading that wrong? We should just go to Europe to get this done instead of waiting till 2018 for this to be available in the USA. Or is the phase 2 trial a different more advanced approach than what is being offered in their Europe clinics?

  3. Hola hace mucho que no entro al blog. Alguien me puede actualizar sobre si hay novedades para la alopecia androgenetica???? hay algo en el corto plazo??’ Gracias.

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