“One of the first women to undergo a uterine transplant is expecting her second child,” announced Professor Mats Brannstrom during the annual conference of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in Birmingham. Great Britain is following in Sweden’s footsteps. In Sweden, most of the women followed up in Professor Brannstrom’s clinic (nine overall) were given “their own mother’s uterus”.
In the United Kingdom, the first clinical trials began in early September 2015 and focus on ten women who were selected for this procedure (cf. Launch of first uterus transplants in the United Kingdom). The English experts nevertheless felt that “the recovery of donor organs is a complex operation, not without risk”. They therefore considered performing these transplants from “clinically dead donors on life support machines”.
Richard Smith who leads the UK Uterine Transplant Research Program said, “Mats Brannstrom and his team have achieved a very important proof of concept and we heartily congratulate them once again […] Infertility is a huge and growing problem affecting tens of thousands of women in this country – and the success of the Swedish team shows that at least some of these women will be able to bear their own child when before there was no hope”.
In the United Kingdom, thousands of women are born without a functional uterus. Others undergo ablation due to cancer or another serious disease.
BBC 20/06/2016