Woman gives sister uterus in UK transplant first

A 40-year-old woman has donated her uterus to her younger sister in the UK's first successful transplant of its kind.

The surgery took approximately 17 hours in total; eight hours to remove the uterus from the donor and nine hours to implant it in the recipient.

A team of over 30 carried out the procedure, led by Professor Richard Smith, a consultant gynaecological surgeon at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, and Dr Isabel Quiroga, consultant surgeon at the Oxford Transplant Centre.

Dr Quiroga, who led the team implanting the uterus, said the recipient was '..absolutely over the moon, very happy, and is hoping that she can go on to have not one but two babies. Her womb is functioning perfectly and we are monitoring her progress very closely.'

The recipient, 34, was born with Type 1 Mayer-Roitansky-Kuster-Hauser syndrome, a rare condition where the uterus never fully develops. This condition affects 1 in 5000 women worldwide.

According to Professor Smith: 'The shocking truth is that there are currently more than 15,000 women of child-bearing age in this country who have absolute uterine factor infertility. They were either born without a womb or have had a hysterectomy due to cancer or other abnormalities of the womb.'

In addition he said: 'You've got girls, maybe 14, who have not had periods, they go to the GP and a scan shows there is no uterus. Absolute catastrophe. Up until now, there's been no solution for that, other than adoption or surrogacy.... That's not the case now. It's really exciting.'

The surgery was a first for the UK but not in other parts of the world. Over 100 uterus transplants have been carried out worldwide and 50 babies have been born as a result of this procedure, with the first successful surgery having taken place in Sweden in 2014 after a woman received a donated uterus from a friend in her 60s.

The procedure, costing £25,000 was sponsored and funded by the charity Womb Transplant UK following approval from the Human Tissue Authority. It was funded by the charity as womb transplants are not currently funded by the NHS as the surgery is deemed too experimental. Despite this, the same team intend to carry out another transplant later this year and said they could potentially perform up to 30 operations a year for women unable to carry pregnancies due to uterine factor infertility. They are running a living and deceased donor programme, though at present only relatives can donate via the living donor programme.

Following the procedure, the recipient was well enough to leave hospital after ten days, had her first period three weeks later, and has had three menstrual periods since the surgery, indicating that the womb was functioning well, the case study published in the British Journal of Gynaecology reported. Both the donor and recipient intend to remain anonymous.