Four years after receiving the first uterus transplant in France, Déborah gave birth to her second little girl, Maxine, born on February 17, announced the Foch hospital in Suresnes, where the birth took place. The little girl has arrived”after 35 weeks of pregnancy in very good conditions” and weighs 2kg550. With her sister Misha born on February 12, 2021, they are the first two babies born after the first uterus transplant in France.
Déborah suffers from Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome, a congenital pathology responsible for infertility by uterine agenesis: she was born without a uterus. It affects approximately 1 in 4,500 women in France. In 2019, she received her mother’s uterus, allowing her to consider pregnancy. The machine starts up: in January 2019, the patient’s oocytes (then 34 years old) are collected and fertilized with the spermatozoa of her partner. The embryos are then frozen. Thanks to robotic surgery, the uterus of a donor (who was none other than Déborah’s mother, then 57 years old) was removed and then transplanted to Déborah in March 2019. It was a success: the graft is not rejected.
In July 2020, the doctors decided to attempt in vitro fertilization (IVF), which consists of implanting a frozen embryo in the transplanted uterus. Here again, the planets align: Déborah becomes pregnant. After 7 and a half months (33 weeks) of pregnancy, little Misha comes into the world and makes her parents happy. “We often say to ourselves, with Déborah, that we have a lucky star“, confided Pierre, the dad, to our colleagues from Parisian.
A second successful transplant
Led by the team of Pr Jean-Marc Ayoubi, head of the Gynecology, Obstetrics and Reproductive Medicine department at the Foch Hospital, this operation is the fruit of more than 15 years of research and has since been repeated: in September 2022, a second uterus transplant was performed on a 36-year-old woman with the same syndrome. She received her 41-year-old sister’s womb.
Currently, specialists estimate that around 100,000 women in France do not have a functional uterus – due to Rokitansky syndrome, cancer, hysterectomy… Doctors hope so that the uterus transplant will (very) soon become a more common medical procedure – and not just a “prowess”. The Biomedicine Agency and the National Medicines and Health Products Safety Agency (ANSM) have also authorized a clinical trial for 10 additional transplants.
Source :
- Press release, Foch Hospital of Suresnes