YOU LITTLE MIRACLE!

Face of baby born after first womb transplant from dead donor - and her mother’s story of hope

‘This is extremely exciting’

PICTURED smiling with her delighted and proud mother and father, this little girl gives hope to thousands of childless women.

Luisa Santos’s mother, Fabiana, had no womb until she received one from a dead woman in a pioneering transplant operation in Brazil.

In an exclusive interview, she tells the Mail of the heartache, fear and – finally – joy when her impossible dream of childbirth came true.

‘Luisa is our little miracle,’ she said.

Spurred on by the breakthrough, more surgeons are planning womb transplants from early next year.

Luisa’s delivery last December – weighing 5lb 10oz – proved the procedure can be carried out safely using a dead donor’s womb, giving doctors the confidence to replicate the process.

Until now they had planned to primarily focus on live donors, because no transplant Proud: Luisa and parents had ever succeeded using a womb from a dead woman.

And the latest transplants are likely to be done using a live donor, as it will be easier to schedule the timing of the operation. But a transplant from a dead donor will follow when one with a viable womb becomes available.

The full details of how the Brazilian team carried out the 11-hour operation in 2016 were published in full in The Lancet medical journal this week.

It was a major undertaking, and it was performed against the clock to make sure the womb was implanted before it began to die.

While surgeons removed organs from the dead donor, another team started to prepare Luisa’s mother for her new womb – a procedure which itself took two hours – dissecting blood vessels and creating space in the tissue of her abdomen.

The womb was then lowered into her body and connected to her veins and arteries, ligaments and vaginal canal.

Each vessel had to be stitched to the new womb.

After surgery, she was in intensive care for two days, and spent a further six days recovering on a ward.

Ten previous attempts in the US, Czech Republic and Turkey, to transplant a womb from a dead donor have ended in failure.

Eleven babies have been born using wombs from live donors.

One of the leading doctors in the field, Dr Srdjan Saso of Imperial College London, has told of his excitement about the development. He said: ‘For those of us involved in uterine transplantation research, this is extremely exciting.

‘This successful demonstration demonstrates a few advantages over live donation. It enables use of a much wider potential donor population, applies lower costs and avoids live donors’ surgical risks.’

And Richard Smith, a leading consultant gynaecologist at Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea Hospital in London, who leads a team, said: ‘This is another first, and further proof that womb transplants using organs from live donors and from donors who have just died are a real option for some of the many, many women who do not have a viable womb.’

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