Worlds first child born after uterus transplantation

In a ground-breaking research project at the University of Gothenburg, seven Swedish women have had embryos reintroduced after receiving wombs from living donors.

Now the first transplanted woman has delivered a baby -- a healthy and normally developed boy. The world-unique birth was acknowledged in The Lancet on 5 October.

The uterus transplantation research project at the University of Gothenburg started in 1999 and has been evaluated in over 40 scientific articles. The goal of the Gothenburg project is to enable women who were born without a womb or who have lost their wombs in cancer surgery to give birth to their own children.

Nine women in the project have received a womb from live donors -- in most cases the recipient's mother but also other family members and close friends. The transplanted uterus was removed in two cases, in one case due to a serious infection and in the other due to blood clots in the transplanted blood vessels.

The seven remaining women have in 2014 tried to become pregnant through a process where their own embryos, produced through IVF, are reintroduced to the transplanted uterus.

The first early pregnancy was confirmed in the spring after a successful first pregnancy attempt in a woman in her mid-30s, a little over a year after her transplantation. In early September, the woman successfully delivered a baby by caesarean section, making her the first woman in the world to deliver a child from a transplanted uterus. Her uterus was donated by a 61-year-old unrelated woman.