Ovary Donation Leads to Birth

Transplant drugs were not needed after surgery because the women are genetically identical.

By September, Yarber was having normal menses and in October she became pregnant "the old-fashioned way," Silber said.

The pregnancy was uneventful and, after 38 weeks of gestation, Yarber had a normal vaginal delivery Monday, the research team said.

Physicians have been working for at least seven years to develop ways to remove and store ovarian tissue for women who are about to undergo chemotherapy or radiation treatments that would kill undeveloped eggs.

Oktay and his colleagues have reported success in restoring menstrual cycles in a handful of women using their frozen ovary tissues, but the women have only one or two cycles before again becoming infertile.

The freezing and thawing are pretty straightforward, Oktay said Tuesday. It's the reimplantation that has proved difficult, so Silber's success is a step forward.

In September, Dr. Jacques Donnez of Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium reported the birth of a baby girl, Tamara Touirat, after reimplantation of frozen ovarian tissue seven years after Tamara's mother, Ouarda, began chemotherapy for Hodgkin's disease.

But critics such as Oktay said that recovery of ovarian function, while rare, was not unheard of. Critics estimated that the odds were about even that the birth resulted from the transplant.

Donnez reported earlier this year that he had restored menses in another woman, but she had not yet become pregnant.

In a more radical approach, Dr. Carina G. Hilders and her colleagues at Reinier de Graff Hospital in the Netherlands reported last year that they had successfully transplanted a young woman's ovary into her upper arm, out of reach of radiation treatments. The tissue had normal cycles and continued to produce an egg every month, they reported in the journal Cancer.

They have not reported attempting to reimplant the tissue.