Official Photos of Saving Faces Cycle Event Now Available

Saving Faces supporter and professional photographer, Scott Balfour, has generously donated his time and skills and we are pleased to announce that his photographs of the Saving Faces Cycle Day are now available to view on-line click here.

Scott has been working hard to re-frame and digitally enhance the photos. The complete set of high resolution images, is now available to buy on a CD for £25. You can share these beautiful electronic images with friends and family, display them in a digital photo frame, print and frame your favourites or use them to make gifts, such as cards or puzzles to name just a few of the options available.

You can purchase the CD online or if you prefer you may send us a cheque for £25 with your name and address to

Saving Faces,
St Bartholomew’s Hospital,
West Smithfield,
London,
EC1A 7BE

When purchasing through Just Giving please ensure that you provide your full postal address.

Please note that this is a purchase and thus not eligible for Gift Aid

With best wishes,

The Saving Faces Team

The sponsored family bike ride was a huge success. We certainly could not have asked for better weather. We would like to thank everyone involved with this event – the cyclists, those of you who were unable to join in, but generously sponsored your relatives, friends or Iain and his colleagues and last, but by no means least of course, all the helpers. You are all wonderful and we have raised lots of money which is still coming in. We will give you the final amount as soon as we have it.

Professor Hutchison completed his 50 miles. His online sponsorship page is still open to receive donations

http://www.justgiving.com/Iain-Hutchison

Jon Snow cycled 25 miles

Iain Hutchison setting off on his 50 mile ride

Ruby Wax, Kathy Lette and Jon Snow awarding medals and T shirts

Surgeons in Spain have carried out the world’s first full- face transplant. The achievement is remarkable, but also controversial. The ongoing medical treatment required by face transplant patients may leave them vulnerable to other illnesses and to psychological problems concerning their identity.

Stephen Sackur talks to reconstructive surgeon Iain Hutchison about whether transplant surgery is really the best way to help people who have been facially disfigured and disabled.

Watch the interview

Pioneering reconstructive surgery has been carried out by maxillofacial surgeon Simon Holmes, a Saving Faces’ trustee and a colleague of the founder of the charity, Professor Iain Hutchison.

Two brothers were set upon by a gang and were both bludgeoned unconscious. They needed expert surgery to put their torn-apart faces back together. David was so horribly injured that half of his face was caved in after he suffered a broken cheekbone, jaw shattered in six places, broken palate and fractured teeth. His brother’s eye socket caved in after he was hit.

A team of doctors at the maxillofacial surgical unit at the Royal London Hospital, led by consultant Simon Holmes, carried out a four-and-a-half hour operation on David to rebuild the right side of his face.

Click on the link to read news report

Dan Welldon entered a bike race in the Scottish Highlands to raise money for Saving Faces and Macmillan Cancer Support.

The race itself was eventful and made front page news in all the newspapers in Scotland as it was sabotaged by a few locals upset that the roads were closed for 3 hours early on a Sunday morning. Thus halfway through the event cyclists found themselves riding through a 20 mile carpet of nails that had been strewn along the route.

Continue reading →

On Thursday the 7th of May, Saving Faces in association with The BioCentre presented an afternoon and evening event hosted by the Dana Centre as part of its Summer Events Programme. Both events were free; the afternoon section (Saving Face) was for interested professionals/organisations and concerned the implications for facial surgery of new technology and techniques. The evening event (Facing Up) was open to everybody and explored the same issues in more general terms.

The more informal evening meeting included presentations from and discussions between surgical, scientific, psychiatric and ethical colleagues. As a direct result of this meeting a team of British surgeons and scientists are collaborating to carry out facial reconstruction using the patient’s own stem cells to generate new tissue. The team is led by Professor Iain Hutchison, who organised the conference.

Facial deficits causing disfigurement can involve loss of bone, muscle fat and skin. In the past 3 decades surgeons have found revolutionary ways to reconstruct the face using huge segments of tissue from the patients’ own bodies but this necessitates 2 long operations, one to harvest the tissue from one part of the body and the second to fashion it to approximately the correct shape of the facial defect. This also can cause problems at the patient’s donor site and usually does not reproduce facial form and function exactly.

The recent use of facial transplants from dying donors has gone some way to solve these issues but has created new problems. The patient has to take immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of their lives and these drugs increase the risk of infection and cancer and generally weaken muscles and bones. These problems are highlighted by the young Chinese man who received the world’s 3rd face transplant and who stopped taking the drugs, lost the transplant and died.

Professor Iain Hutchison and his colleagues believe that tissue engineering is likely to provide the best solution to the challenges of facial reconstruction. With the active participation of their patients, the British team plan to build replacement facial and skull bones in the patients’ own bodies using the patients’ own stem cells, genetically engineered proteins which stimulate correct growth and computer generated scaffolds.