Following the success of a similar procedure in Sweden, British health regulators have given their permission for doctors to produce the first 10 womb transplants in the UK, with the first currently scheduled to take place as part of a clinical trial next spring.
According to Mashable and BBC News, the transplants were approved by the Health Research Authority earlier this week. The wombs will be taken from “brain dead” donors whose hearts are still beating, explained Dr. Richard Smith, a consultant gynecologist at Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea Hospital in London who has been involved in the project for nearly two decades.
The operation will cost approximately $60,000 (£40,000) and will take around six hours. Recipients will need to take immunosuppressant drugs while the womb is inside their bodies, but once the baby is born, the womb can be removed. If successful, the first baby to be born using this method in the UK could arrive by early 2018.
Last October, a Swedish woman made history when she was the first person ever to give birth to a child using a transplanted womb from a living mother. That child, Baby Vincent, was born to a 36-year-old mother who received a transplanted womb donated by a friend in her 60s. Since then, three additional infants have been born using similar techniques.
Procedure requires one-year wait before embryo can be implanted
More than 5,000 women in the UK are born without wombs each year, and approximately 300 of them signed up to be candidates for the surgery, Mashable said. Of them, 104 were found to meet the criteria to be selected for the trial – no more than 38 years old, with a healthy bodyweight and in a relationship with a long-term partner.
If a woman is chosen, doctors would monitor her health for a period of one year while she received immunosuppressant drugs in order to prevent her body from rejecting the donor organ, BBC News explained. If she remains in good health, only then will an embryo will be implanted in the womb.
That embryo would arise from a combination of the woman’s own eggs and the partners’ sperm, created using IVF procedures, and barring complications, the baby will be delivered eight months later by caesarean section. Couples will be allowed to try up to two pregnancies before the womb will be removed from the mother.
British Fertility Society chairman Professor Adam Balen said that the decision “opens up the possibility for these women to carry their own pregnancy rather than rely upon IVF with their eggs and surrogacy. The UK team have 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.”
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