Womb transplants may become a reality in as little as 2 years

October 22, 2009 by Shawn Douglas  
Filed under: News, Pregnancy

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Womb transplants could potentially help women who were born without a womb or who suffered uterine damage have a baby.

Nearly 15,000 women in the U.K. currently have either been born without a uterus or have had it removed due to a disease like cancer. However, new research into the process of transplanting a womb into rabbits may carry over to human research in as little as two years.

Dr. Richard Smith of London’s Hammersmith Hospital recently presented his latest research at an Atlanta reproduction summit. Dr. Smith hopes—with more funding and animal research—to be able to successfully transplant a womb into a human patient.

Smith and his team performed the transplantation on five donor rabbits and five recipients. Using a special “vascular patch technique”, the team attached the new wombs to the recipients.

The new technique had to be implemented as previous attempts failed due to blood clots or unsuccessful aortal attachment. Of the five rabbits, two of them lived for up to 10 months. After the rabbits died, the team examined the rabbits and found that the surgery was successful, although the rabbits were not able to become pregnant after being mated. Dr. Smith said that additional research needed to be done with fertilized embryos implanted in the rabbits’ wombs.

However, funding has been difficult to come by according to Smith. The group has set up a charity called “Uterine Transplant U.K.” to raise £250,000 for additional research.

“With appropriate funding we could run through all the tests needed to get this into humans within two years,” stated Smith.

“Nobody should move this into a human setting until this procedure has been made as safe as possible. You could never in all conscience carry off this procedure if there was a chance of death or disability.”

Other doctors are skeptical of the two-year target set by Smith’s team.

“I think there is a big difference between demonstrating effectiveness in a rabbit and being able to do this in a larger animal or a human,” said Tony Rutherford, the chairman of the British Fertility Society.

“I don’t think it is something that is going to be available in clinical practice for some years to come.”

A womb transplant was tried once before on a woman by Saudi Arabian doctors in 2000, but the womb had to be removed after only four months due to blood supply failure.

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