A groundbreaking surgery has recently taken place in Sweden, and it could mean great things for the future of fertility treatments. It seems a team of specialists at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg have successfully performed two womb transplants.
One of the patients, a cervical cancer survivor, was without a uterus due to her cancer treatments. The other woman required a transplant due to a birth defect causing her to be born without a uterus. Both received new wombs using a transplant procedure that – according to sources at the university – was ten years in the making.
Everything about this is interesting, but one of the more fascinating details is that the idea initially came from a patient. Apparently Dr. Mats Brännström, professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Gothenburg and the driving force behind the transplants, was once asked by a patient whose uterus he had removed why he couldn’t simply give her mother’s womb to her so that she could conceive a child.
The question stayed with Dr. Brännström, and now years later he has made womb transplants a reality. The reason it took so long to bring this vision to fruition is because a significant amount of testing was required to make sure the procedure would be safe for patients. New elective procedures such as this are subject to a high amount of scrutiny where safety is concerned.
The team behind the procedure first tried the transplant on mice, and then gradually moved on to larger animals. When a womb transplant between two baboons proved successful, the doctors determined it was time to attempt the procedure with a human patient.
This is a truly revolutionary development in obstetrics, and one that promises to bring new hope to women who had previously believed that they could never conceive.
Check out the video below to learn more about this incredible breakthrough.
