On Sunday March 31, a 34-year-old woman born without a uterus was able to benefit from a transplant of this organ in a hospital in the Ile-de-France region thanks to her mother’s donation. This is the first time that such an operation has been carried out in France.
This is a medical first on French soil. On Sunday March 31, a 34-year-old woman born without a uterus was able to have this organ transplanted to the Foch hospital in Suresnes, near Paris.
Carried out by the team of Professor Jean-Marc Ayoubi, head of the gynecology-obstetrics and reproductive medicine department at the Foch hospital, this uterus transplant was performed from a 57-year-old living donor who is other than the recipient’s mother. The latter, suffering from Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome, was born without a uterus, a condition that affects one in 4,500 women at birth.
Asked by AFP, Jean-Marc Ayoubi assured that the two patients “are fine”. “The transplanted patient is not yet pregnant and the transfer of previously frozen embryos could be done in ten months”, explains the surgeon. In the previous cases, carried out internationally, “it was done between six and twelve months”, he noted.
A temporary transplant
Currently, the uterus transplant is intended for women born without this organ or for those from whom it had to be removed. The total operating time was about 14 hours. It was the operation to remove the uterus that took the longest: the surgical team had to be very meticulous so that the uterus could be reimplanted. She used a robot offering 3D vision to better dissect the very fine vessels. The graft was performed by conventional surgery.
However, specifies Dr. Ayoubi, this transplant is not intended to be permanent because of the immunosuppressive treatment. He also recalls that it is a “provisional” transplant which should allow the recipient to have a child.
Indeed, to make the anti-rejection treatment suitable for pregnancy, it is “less cumbersome” than in the case of other organ transplants. According to the surgeon, this type of operation represents an experimental alternative to surrogacy (GPA), currently prohibited in France, or even adoption.
Other uterus transplants planned in France
To perform this first uterus transplant in France, Professor Ayoubi’s team received authorization from the Biomedicine Agency and the National Agency for the Safety of Medicines and Health Products (ANSM). The clinical trial should allow them to perform 9 other transplants with related living donors. A team from the University Hospital of Limoges received authorization for 8 transplants with donors in a state of brain death.
The first uterus transplant took place in Sweden in 2014 with the team of Professor Mats Brännström, from the University of Gothenburg, who collaborated with that of Dr Ayoubi. “We have been working with this pioneering Swedish team for seven to eight years (…). We have brought our expertise in robotic surgery which they have used for their last five transplants” in order to perform the removal of the uterus, a specified the French surgeon.
From this world first, a baby was born one year after the transplant. The living donor was 61 years old.
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