London: In a medical breakthrough, a 28-year-old woman has become the first person in the world to give birth to a healthy baby using ovarian tissue that was removed and frozen in her childhood.
Previous successful transplants resulting in pregnancies have used frozen ovary tissue removed from adult women, but this is the first time ovarian tissue was taken from a girl when she was just 13 years and 11 months old.
It was not known whether tissue taken from girls before puberty could develop to produce mature eggs. The breakthrough, described in the journal Human Reproduction, gives hope to thousands of young cancer victims that face treatments such as chemotherapy which can damage the ovaries, leaving them infertile.
The patient, who was born in the Republic of Congo but moved to Belgium aged 11, had received a transplant of her brother’s bone marrow to treat her sickle-cell anaemia. The procedure required chemotherapy to disable the immune system and prevent rejection of the bone marrow. Doctors removed her right ovary just before she turned 14 and froze tissue fragments. Puberty and breast development had begun but she had not started her periods.
