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Published 23 Aug, 2023 12:58pm

First womb transplant in UK opens possibility for infertile women to have children

Doctors in the United Kingdom have performed the first womb transplant surgery opening the possibility for infertile women to have babies, reported The Guardian.

A 34-year-old married woman received a womb from her sister through a nine-hour-long operation.

She said she was “incredibly Happy” and “over the moon”.

According to the medical team behind the pioneering procedure, she has plan to have two children using IVF.

Both sisters were not identified by the Oxford Transplant Centre, a part of Oxford University hospitals.

The recipient was born with a rare medical condition and her womb was underdeveloped.

She received a womb from her 40-year-old sister who already has two children.

This was not the first transplant in the world countries including Sweden, the US, Saudi Arabia, Turkiye, China, the Czech Republic, Brazil, Germany, Serbia and India have performed more than 90 womb transplants which resulted in 50 babies have been born.

The co-lead surgeon Isabel Quiroga, a consultant surgeon at the Oxford Transplant Centre said she was “thrilled” and “extremely proud” the surgery had been a success.

She said: “The patient was absolutely over the moon, very happy and is hoping that she can go on to have not one but two babies. Her womb is functioning perfectly and we are monitoring her progress very closely.”

A second transplant of another woman is to take place this autumn while more patients were in the preparation stage. Surgeons have approval for 10 operations including brain-dead donors plus five using living donors.

Another co-lead surgeon Prof Richard Smith, the clinical lead at the charity Womb Transplant UK and a consultant gynaecological surgeon at Imperial College London, said the operation had been a “massive success”.

“It was incredible,” he said. “I think it was probably the most stressful week in my surgical career but also unbelievably positive. The donor and recipient are over the moon, just over the moon.

“I feel emotional about it all. During the first consultation with the recipient post-op, we were all almost in tears,” he added.

Smith said: “I’m just really happy that we’ve got a donor who is completely back to normal after her big op and the recipient is, after her big op, doing really well on her immunosuppressive therapy and looking forward to hopefully having a baby.”

The women receiving the womb were born with Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster Hauser Syndrom (MRKH), a rare congenital disorder that affects the female reproductive system. And affecting about one in every 5,000 women.

Before receiving her sister’s womb, the woman had two rounds of fertility stimulation to produce eggs, followed by intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) to create embryos.

Transplants could help women born without a functioning womb and those who lose their organs to cancer or other conditions.

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