LONDON, June 18: A London hospital is set to give the go-ahead for a surgeon to conduct the world’s first full face transplant, The Sunday Times newspaper said.

Peter Butler, a consultant plastic surgeon at the Royal Free Hospital in north London, has been contacted by 29 disfigured volunteers willing to undergo the procedure, the weekly said.

The hospital’s ethical committee is expected to announce Wednesday that it will approve the first operations, The Observer newspaper reported.

“My aim is not to be first, but to do it on the right patient,” Mr Butler said.

“It would be very dangerous to look at it as a race because it could harm the patient and (the reputation of) the procedure,” he told The Sunday Times.

Mr Butler said one potential candidate was a 22-year-old who was badly burned as a child.

Last year, surgeons in France carried out the world’s first partial face transplant. Isabelle Dinoire, 38, had her nose, lips and chin replaced after being savaged by a dog.

In April, a hospital in China conducted what is believed to be the second partial face transplant on Li Guoxing, 30.

Mr Butler’s 30-strong team have spent 10 years studying face transplants.

“We have done everything we can to prepare for this surgery, and we would like to go ahead,” he told The Observer.

“We don’t know how people will react. Does the government want us to go ahead with this? We just don’t know. But a huge amount of work has been done with the group of patients who might benefit from this surgery.

“Many of them have very disfiguring injuries and spend their lives indoors so for them, this is not just life-enhancing surgery, it is life-saving because it gives them back the chance to join society.”

He said he would rather perform the operation on four or five people to give it more “scientific validity”. —AFP