The world’s first mother-daughter uterus transplant could take place next year in Sweden, the head of an international research team in the western Swedish city of Gothenburg said on Tuesday. “We have reached a stage where we have started to plan for a human transplant and we are investigating 10 pairs, most of those are mother and daughters,” Mats Braenstroem told AFP, adding the first of such transplants could take place “hopefully at the beginning of next year.”
He added that transplanting a womb from a woman to her daughter would be a world first, although a uterus transplant between two unrelated women took place in Saudi Arabia in 2002. His international team of doctors at the Sahlgrenska University Hospital has been researching the subject for a decade and has tested it on animals, he said, explaining there were no particular complications in transplanting a womb from mother to daughter.
“There can just be an advantage because they are more similar in their tissues so there could be less rejection in that situation,” he said. One of the pairs undergoing the physical and psychological tests required ahead of a possible procedure were quoted in Swedish media Tuesday as saying they were grateful to be part of the project.
“I have been given an opportunity I did not think was possible,” a 25-year old woman born without a uterus told tabloid Expressen. “I have always loved children. Over the past five years I have felt intense sorrow over not being able to have children of my own,” she told its competitor Aftonbladet.
The woman could receive a uterus from her 56-year-old mother, who said she no longer had any use for the organ and that it felt natural to do everything she could to help her daughter.