Pregnancies by womb transplant to begin in UK

After successful trial in Sweden & necessary legal hurdles are cleared, 10 women set to undergo womb transplant in UK. Permission for the trial to be started in the first half of the next year has been granted by the Imperial College London.

Part of this consternation stems from the decision to take the uteruses from “brain-dead” donors who have healthy bodies- as opposed to the willing, living family member donors of the Swedish cases.

Once the fully recovered from the transplant, the woman will be impregnated via In Vitro fertilization because her fallopian tubes will not be connected to the new uterus.

Dr. Richard Smith is the team leader of the transplants.

“I’ve always been an enormous optimist”, Dr. Smith said. He added that he became attached to the effort upon meeting women whose wombs were removed for whatever reason or those who were born without one.

If all is well, each woman will be implanted with one of her embryos. Eight months later, the baby is delivered via C-section.

In order to be eligible for the trial procedure, women must have functioning ovaries, their own eggs, a long term partner, be of a healthy weight and be aged between 25-38.

The study, which is planned for next year, was just granted approval by the Health Research Authority, part of the U.K.’s Department of Health, which oversees research on humans.

Each transplant costs about 50,000 Euros, or about $56,000, to perform, but doctors are aiming to raise money that would prevent the 10 women involved from paying for the operations themselves.

Sweden’s recent success with uterus transplants has encouraged Great Britain to follow suit. The womb will be taken from a donor who has died but whose heart has been kept beating.

In addition, women may want to have complete control over the environment that their fetus grows in, which they can’t do with a surrogate, Campo-Engelstein said. “Infertility is a hard thing to treat for these women”, Smith told the Guardian.

A uterine or womb transplant, or surgical operation, is supposed to be conducted on a woman who does not have a womb when she is born, or has lost her womb due to cancer.

The transplant procedure takes approximately six hours to complete, and the patient is closely monitored for one year.

Before the surgery takes place, surgeons freeze the embryos created from the woman’s egg and her partner’s sperm to later be implanted in the donor uterus. A transplant will give them a baby that is genetically their own while allowing them to experience the joy of pregnancy. This will save the patient from taking the immunosuppressant drugs, which are required to control the human immune system from rejecting the transplanted uterus.

Adam Balen from British Fertility Society stated, “The United Kingdom team has been working on this for many years and so it is very exciting that they have been given the go-ahead to move into clinical practice”.