Ten British women without wombs will get the chance to carry their own babies after approval was granted by a special committee at Imperial College London.
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A clinical trial of 10 transplants will begin in the spring, with the first baby from a transplanted womb potentially being born in late 2017 or 2018, the BBC reports.
According to stats, around one in 7,000 women are born without a womb, and others lose their womb to cancer; around 100 women have been already listed to receive donors and the first baby born via a womb transplant will probably happen in 2017.
“Absolute Infertility can bring with it awful consequences for as many as 50,000 women of childbearing age in the United Kingdom who do not have a viable womb”. They had under 38, have functioning ovaries and their own eggs, as well as a long-term partner, and be deemed a healthy weight.
There is no doubting that, for many couples, childlessness is a disaster.
Over 300 women approached the Womb Transplant United Kingdom team to sign up for the surgery, and 104 were deemed to meet the criteria. ‘Surrogacy is an option but it does not answer the deep desire that women have to carry their own baby.
A transplant could be of benefit to the thousands of women in the United Kingdom who do not have a womb. If all goes smoothly, a baby would be delivered nine months later by caesarean. “For a woman to carry her own baby – that has to be a wonderful thing”.
About 15,000 women in Britain were born without a womb.
Embryos will be created in a frozen state before the trial starts.
He said that trial would use deceased donors rather than living ones because of the complexities of the operation.
The embryo can only be implanted after 12 months of treatment with immunosuppressant drugs, which stop the woman rejecting the new organ. Since the early 2000’s Doctors have been trying unsuccessfully to transplant wombs in women in order for them to give birth in Saudi Arabia, the United States, France, Britain and Sweden.
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“Donor retrieval is a bigger operation than transplanting the uterus into the recipient”, the surgeon said. That would minimise the risk of keeping women on immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of their lives. The charity launched an appeal to raise the £500,000 ($758,532) needed for the 10 operations. Coordinaters of the project have estimated that there could be about five wombs a year available for the operation. “As soon as I felt this ideal baby boy on my chest, I had tears of happiness and enormous relief”, said the mother. “Somehow or other, somebody has always turned up and given us enough money to keep it going”, the surgeon said.
