For the first time a woman has become pregnant after having thin slices of her ovaries removed and frozen during cancer treatment, and then re-implanted.
The woman became pregnant naturally, by having sex. Other research teams have tried IVF with eggs taken from such patients, but no pregnancy has yet resulted.
The woman, now in her early 30s, is about 24 weeks pregnant and expecting a baby girl. A spokesman at the Catholic University of Louvain in Brussels, Belgium, where the procedure took place, told New Scientist on Tuesday that things were 鈥減rogressing very well鈥�.
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The achievement offers the hope of restoring fertility and normal hormone levels in female cancer patients, many of whom become menopausal and infertile at a young age as a result of cancer treatment.
The first announcement was made in April by Jacques Donnez, at the Catholic University of Louvain,. However, the news came to general attention during a press conference at the annual conference of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology in Berlin, Germany, on Tuesday.
Aggressive chemotherapy
The woman had strips of ovarian tissue removed and frozen in 1997 before undergoing aggressive chemotherapy and radiotherapy for Hodgkin鈥檚 lymphoma.
In February 2003, Donnez and his team re-implanted a strip of ovarian tissue back onto what remained of her ovaries. Four months later, they found that the graft had been accepted and that the woman was having normal periods.
The woman then fell pregnant naturally. Scans in April confirmed that her baby was developing well and growing normally.
鈥淭his is fantastic,鈥� said Claus Yding Andersen, of the University Hospital of Copenhagen, Denmark. 鈥淚t is definitely a breakthrough and has lots of implications for lots of women around the world鈥�.
Anderson鈥檚 own work, presented at the ESHRE conference, involved producing and implanting the first IVF embryo made from eggs taken from ovarian tissue that had been re-implanted just under the skin. This makes it easier to remove in case it contains remnants of the patient鈥檚 cancer. But Andersen鈥檚 patient did not become pregnant.
Spontaneous recovery
However, another expert on ovarian grafting sounded a note of caution. Kutluk Oktay of Weill Medical College, Cornell University, said that it was possible the Belgian woman鈥檚 ovaries had spontaneously recovered and that the pregnancy did not arise from eggs originating in the graft. This has been documented in cancer patients before.
However, because the woman鈥檚 graft was placed back on her ovaries, it will be hard to tell. More details may emerge when Donnez gives his presentation at the ESHRE conference on Wednesday.
Oktay said that if the pregnancy has arisen from the graft, it would be a welcome first. 鈥淚t would be a landmark finding. I would be ecstatic.鈥�
However, he said it was too early to offer such an invasive and new technology to healthy women wishing to extend their childbearing years or delay menopause. For now, he said, 鈥渢his is offered as an emergency procedure to cancer patients who are about to lose their fertility鈥�.