USA/FILE: Doctors from New York claim to have succesfully carried out the first uterus transplant operation on monkeys

Doctors from the New York Downtown Hospital in New York City claim to have made a breakthrough in infertility treatments and transplant science by successfully carrying out uterine transplantation in non-human primates. The operation, which took place at the University of Pittsburgh, was carried out on rhesus monkeys and involved the transfer of a healthy uterus from a donor monkey to a recipient monkey. Dr. Giuseppe Del Priore and Dr. Jeanetta Stega from the New York Downtown Hospital led the operation, which was conducted on October 10 along with Dr. Stefan Schlatt from Pittsburgh University. The doctors said that this was the first procedure of this sort on a primate. In an interview at New York, Dr. Giuseppe Del Priore, who has also written several papers on the subject of uterine transplant and is actively involved in research in this field, said that his team's surgery on primates was key in developing essential know-how for eventually conducting uterine transplants in humans. "I believe this is the first time it's been done in a primate, certainly it has not been recorded in primates before and all of the other models are important in contributing to our overall knowledge. in fact we have been doing early work with the organ donor network in preparation of doing it in a human. So, even that in a real person was a just part of the overall process, and the primates are going to be as close as possible to the last experimental step before we actually do it in a young person," said Dr. Del Priore. Dr. Del Priore and Dr. Stega's research on uterine transplant is part of the New York Downtown Hospital's Cancer and Fertility Society (CFS) initiative, which started in 2002 and focuses on finding ways to preserve fertility in patients who have suffered from reproductive organ cancers. Dr. Del Priore and Dr. Stega say their research is motivated by many women risk or lose their ability to bear children due to damaging radiation, chemotherapy and surgery. For these women, they say preservation of fertility is crucial and thereby an increasingly important area in cancer research. They hope that their transplant operation will eventually enable surgeons to transplant a human uterus into another human recipient eventually, to transfer the genetic embryo of the recipient into their new uterus, and to deliver a healthy child to the recipient. Technically, uterus transplant is considered especially challenging because unlike in other organ transplants, there is no unified blood source. Dr. Del Priore said that the uterus has at least four blood sources and some say -- upto six sources. As for the transplant operation on rhesus monkeys being termed a success by the New York Downtown Hospital doctors, Dr. Michael J. Slowey, a reproductive endocrinologist, obstetrician and gynecologist, weighed in. Dr. Slowey said that since it had been barely two weeks after the surgery on October 10, it still might be "a bit premature" to term the procedure a "success" as that would depend on whether the transplanted organ remained healthy even after two weeks. Dr. Slowey also pointed out that there was a difference in operating on a healthy animal and one with cancer, so there was still a long way to go in making the transplant viable in humans. He did add that he saw the surgery as a step in the right direction and that he felt the New York Downtown Hospital doctors had gone about the process in the correct way by operating on rhesus monkeys before moving on to humans. According to Dr. Del Priore there is a fairly large demand for the transplant procedure in humans, mainly from patients who've had hysterectomies, after which they are not able to bear their own children. The doctor said that while adoption and surrogacy are still options for these women, some of them would prefer giving birth on their own, if they could. He sees uterine transplant as a way of salvaging a woman's fertility when every other option has been exhausted without results, and this would also become the only way for the rare woman who is born without a uterus to bear a child. "Every year, tens of thousands of women lose their uterus to cervical cancer and for many of them, adoption or surrogacy may not be the perfect answer, so for some number transplant seems like, if it can be done safely, and transplant medicine is moving, progressing ahead, making kidney transplants, liver transplants safer and safer all the time. If the uterus transplant can be done safely, it just is another option for those young people," said Dr. Del Priore. According to Dr. Del Priore, the CFS and its affiliates have received 600 spontaneous requests for uterus transplant procedure by patients whose uteruses have been removed or are damaged. While the benefits of organ transplantation in general are considered numerous, including survival and a better quality of life, doctors say there are also great risks. They point out that organ transplants are predominately unsuccessful as a result of incompatibility between the donor and the recipient, which results in acute or chronic organ rejection. There are also possible complications from long-term pharmacological immune suppression. The risks with uterine transplantation are the same. Despite these risks, the New York Downtown Hospital says many women have already volunteered and been interviewed as candidates for the first few human organ transplants.

ITN Source | October 25, 2006

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