Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. News

First baby born using a womb transplanted from a deceased donor

Luke Dormehl
By

In a world first, doctors have confirmed the birth of a healthy baby girl in Brazil using a womb transplanted from a deceased donor. While this isn’t the first time that a baby has been born using a uterus transplant, they are still very rare — with only 11 babies having been born in this way. This latest achievement opens up new possibilities for women with uterine infertility since it greatly expands the number of potentially available uteruses. Previously people had to rely on either close family or friends.

Infertility is more common than many people realize. Some form of infertility affects up to 15 percent of couples of reproductive age. Around one in 500 women have some type of uterine anomaly which makes it impossible to carry a child to term. Prior to uterus transplants, the only options available to would-be parents in this category was adoption or surrogacy.

Related Videos

While the research is only being published now, the baby was actually born on December 15, 2017. The womb donor was a 45-year-old woman who died as the result of a stroke that caused bleeding on the surface of the brain. Her uterus was removed and transplanted into a 32-year-old woman in an operation lasting 10.5 hours. The recipient had Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome, a condition in which the vagina and womb do not form correctly. As part of the complex procedure, surgeons had to connect the donor uterus to the recipients’ veins, arteries, ligaments, and vaginal canal.

Related

After five months, doctors were satisfied that the uterus would not be rejected by the body and that there were no resulting anomalies. Two months after this, fertilized eggs taken before the operation were implanted in the patient, who then became pregnant. The baby girl was born via cesarean section at just over 35 weeks.

Unlike the other recent childbirth-related scientific breakthrough — the apparent birth of genetically altered twin girls in China — this research is being greeted very positively. The hope is that not only will it enable wider use of potential donor wombs, but that it will avoid the risks associated with live donors.

A paper describing the work, titled “Livebirth after uterus transplantation from a deceased donor in a recipient with uterine infertility,” was recently published in The Lancet.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Using stem cells, scientists just successfully grew a kidney organoid for the first time
Kidney waiting list transplants

Stem cell science has been a highly controversial topic over the years, but it may be well on its way to revolutionizing the high fatality rate expected for those on waitlists for vital organ donations. Stem cells have been particularly successful in this research because they can be scientifically bred into nearly any type of cell that occurs in the body. This key component means that crucial organs grown from stem cells would make urgent transplants viable without having to wait for donors that match a particular blood type or demographic bracket.

Since most humans can live with just one functioning kidney instead of two, transplants are often sourced from within family units or from personal relations when a patient is in urgent need. Unfortunately, that still doesn’t change the fact that, on average, 21 people die every day waiting for organ transplants because waitlists are too long or patient-donor matches can’t be found in time, according to the American Transplant Foundation.

Read more
Steve Jobs turned down liver transplant from Tim Cook, new biography reveals
no apple sneak peek for samsung rules judge steve jobs holding iphone 4 smile

Steve Jobs casts a long shadow for a man who's been gone for four years. Tech pundits and investors pretend to know what he'd think of Apple's latest products, Apple employees invoke his name in most interviews, and iPhone fans speak his name with reverence.  Every now and then, new tidbits about his life and reign at Apple surface. Most recently, the new biography, Becoming Steve Jobs, has created quite a stir with some of its revelations.

Perhaps the most interesting new tale comes from the last years of Jobs' life, when he was suffering from pancreatic cancer. According to interviews held with current CEO Tim Cook, Jobs turned him down when he offered a partial liver transplant.

Read more
The next big thing in science is already in your pocket
A researcher looks at a protein diagram on his monitor

Supercomputers are an essential part of modern science. By crunching numbers and performing calculations that would take eons for us humans to complete by ourselves, they help us do things that would otherwise be impossible, like predicting hurricane flight paths, simulating nuclear disasters, or modeling how experimental drugs might effect human cells. But that computing power comes at a price -- literally. Supercomputer-dependent research is notoriously expensive. It's not uncommon for research institutions to pay upward of $1,000 for a single hour of supercomputer use, and sometimes more, depending on the hardware that's required.

But lately, rather than relying on big, expensive supercomputers, more and more scientists are turning to a different method for their number-crunching needs: distributed supercomputing. You've probably heard of this before. Instead of relying on a single, centralized computer to perform a given task, this crowdsourced style of computing draws computational power from a distributed network of volunteers, typically by running special software on home PCs or smartphones. Individually, these volunteer computers aren't particularly powerful, but if you string enough of them together, their collective power can easily eclipse that of any centralized supercomputer -- and often for a fraction of the cost.

Read more