Woman pregnant after ovarian transplant

1.00pm

BERLIN - A 25-year-old woman has conceived for the first time after having an ovarian tissue transplant, according to reports released on Tuesday.

Doctors from the Universite Catholique de Louvain in Brussels removed and froze ovarian tissue from the unidentified woman before she had chemotherapy treatment for Hodgkin's lymphoma.

She is now 25 weeks pregnant.

News of the breakthrough, which gives new hope to other young cancer patients whose fertility may be damaged by cancer therapies, emerged at the annual meeting of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE).

Professor Jacques Donnez and his team "have managed to achieve what no other team in the world has yet been able to do -- given a young woman, who underwent cryopreservation of ovarian tissue prior to treatment, the gift of pregnancy," the university hospital said in a statement.

The scientists are due to present their research at the ESHRE meeting. It is also due to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, according to a university spokesperson.

The child was conceived naturally and is due in October.

Other teams of scientists have been working on ovarian transplantation but the Belgian team said they are the first to achieve a pregnancy.

Four months after the ovarian tissue was transplanted the woman's ovarian function was restored.

In an interview with a Belgian radio station, Donnez said: "She is pregnant. She lives a life which she could never hope she would have been able to live."

But Dr Kutluk Oktay, a fertility expert at Cornell University in the United States, said more details of the research are needed.

"If you leave women alone, there is a chance of spontaneous recovery of ovarian function," he told BBC News Online. "But there is a viable possibility that the pregnancy came from this graft."

A spokeswoman for the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), which regulates fertility treatment in Britain, said the technique is very much in its early stages.

"But it is something that people need to look at in the future," she added.

- REUTERS