Infertile woman has baby after ovarian tissue transplant

BRUSSELS, Belgium -- "It's a dream," proclaimed the beaming 32-year-old new mother Friday as she cuddled her day-old baby girl, born following a pioneering ovarian tissue transplant performed after the woman was made infertile by chemotherapy.

Doctors hailed the breakthrough procedure, saying it sent a "big message of hope" to cancer patients who have lost their fertility.

"I am very happy, it's what I always wanted," said Ouarda Touirat, who presented her healthy 8-pound, 3-ounce baby, Tamara, dressed in pink, at a news conference at Brussels' Cliniques Universitaires Saint-Luc hospital, where she was born Thursday night.

"I was crying at first, it's a dream ... a big miracle," said Touirat, who became infertile after she underwent chemo-therapy due to Hodgkin's lymphoma in 1997, when she was 25. Her beaming husband, Malik Bouanati, stood beside her.

Dr. Jacques Donnez, head of the Department of Gynecology and Andrology at the hospital and who led the procedure, said it gave cancer survivors a second chance at motherhood.

"It is a big message of hope for all women with cancer who have to have chemotherapy," he said of the procedure, in which doctors cut out Touirat's ovarian tissue before she had chemotherapy, then froze it in liquid nitrogen. Five years after she was cleared of cancer, the tissue was grafted back onto her fallopian tubes, allowing for a natural pregnancy.

News of the procedure was published in the British medical journal The Lancet on Friday.

Describing Touirat's condition, Donnez said: "When I proposed the ovarian graft to the patient we had no idea it was working or not, we just ... [had] experimental studies in animals."

He said the Belgian research team worked closely with other researchers working on similar procedures in the United States, Sweden and Britain.

Donnez said 146 women were undergoing the same procedure in Belgium, but Touirat was one of the first seven years ago to have her ovarian tissue frozen in the procedure, known as cryopreservation.

Donnez was optimistic the procedure would be made easier in the years ahead thanks to advances, meaning more women could be given the choice of having a baby.

He said the treatment was not very expensive, adding it was "much less expensive than in-vitro fertilization."

Donnez said health authorities should make it "a medical legal obligation" to offer women who have to undergo chemotherapy the option for fertility preservation.

"This is the way to go," Donnez said. "Because of the progress ... made by medicine, more and more women are survivors of cancer."

A top expert in the field was cautious, however, saying there was a small chance Touirat's baby came from existing ovaries rather than the transplanted tissue.

"It cannot be proved with 100 percent certainty [that the pregnancy came from the graft] because ovulation from the transplant was calculated from temperature but was not confirmed," said Dr. Kutluk Oktay, an expert who was not involved with Touirat's procedure but has conducted much of the key research in the field.

Even though Touirat's remaining ovarian tissue stopped working after the cancer treatment, it recovered and she ovulated three years later, which indicates it's possible that the native ovaries could have ovulated again to produce the baby, Oktay said.

However, he said the research team from the Catholic University in Louvain, Belgium, made a strong case that the birth resulted from the transplant.

Oktay, a reproductive endocrinologist from Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., said the result would have been definitive if the researchers had tracked the transplanted tissue on a daily basis to verify that the follicle they saw early in the process released an egg and that this was the egg that was fertilized.

Alternatively, if the egg had been harvested from the transplanted tissue and fertilized in a lab before being implanted in the womb, as in normal fertility treatment, the technique would be proven, he said.