Infertile women have been given new hope after the success of the first ovarian transplant between non-identical twins.
Teresa Alvaro, 31, whose ovaries had failed because of chemotherapy and radiotherapy for a blood disorder, received tissues from her 34-year-old sister.
Her ovarian functions were restored and doctors took two eggs from her ovaries, which were then fertilised to produce two embryos. The eggs were artificially inseminated, but the embryos did not develop.
Prof Jacques Donnez, who led the team at the Catholic University of Louvain in Brussels, hailed the breakthrough and said it gave hope to women who did not have the opportunity to freeze eggs or their ovarian tissue.
But Prof Donnez said it was too early to say whether this procedure would ever be successful enough to enable a woman to become pregnant.
The success was partly due to the fact that Teresa had received a bone marrow transplant in 1990 from Sandra, who had an identically matched tissue type.
Teresa, from Belgium, is still hopeful she will become pregnant again. She was inspired to go ahead with the transplant after an American woman, Stephanie Yarber, had a baby in 2005 after her twin sister donated tissue. Ms Yarber went through the menopause at 14. Ms Alvaro said: 'The operation was a success. I can get pregnant the natural way. That's something I could never have hoped for a couple of years ago.' Prof Donnez said in the Human Reproduction journal: 'We do not know why the embryos ceased to develop, but this happens during normal cycles of IVF.'
http://www.metro.co.uk/news/article....&in_page_id=34
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