YOU LITTLE MIRACLE!
WORLD EXCLUSIVE: Gorgeous face of baby born after first womb transplant from dead donor – and her mother’s inspiring story of hope
SLEEPING peacefully in her mother’s arms, this is the little girl whose birth 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 a world 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 says.
Spurred on by the breakthrough, UK surgeons are planning the first
womb transplants here 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. At least 15,000 women in Britain of childbearing age were born without a womb or have had it removed due to cancer or other illness.
British surgeons have ethical approval from the NHS for 15 transplants – five using wombs from live donors and ten from dead women. Until now they had planned to primarily focus on live donors, because no transplant had ever succeeded using a womb from a dead woman.
Richard Smith, consultant gynaecologist at Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea Hospital in London, who is leading the British team, said: ‘The UK womb transplant research team is delighted with the news from Brazil. 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.
‘Preparations are in the final stages and we hope we can replicate this latest success in the not too distant future.’
The first transplant is 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 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, 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 carefully stitched to the new womb. After surgery, she was in intensive care for two days, then spent six days recovering on a ward.
Ten previous attempts, in the US, Czech Republic and Turkey, to transplant a womb from a dead donor ended in failure.
Dr Srdjan Saso of Imperial College London, part of the British team, 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.’
Eleven babies have been born using wombs from live donors.
‘This is extremely exciting’