Sister-to-sister transplant offers fertility hope

By Ben Hirschler

LONDON (Reuters) - A previously sterile Belgian woman has successfully received ovarian tissue from her sister in an advance that could offer hope to women with cancer and other women unsuited to normal IVF treatment, scientists said.

Teresa Alvaro, 37, whose ovaries failed after treatment for cancer, now has restored ovarian function following the transplant operation in February last year.

Jacques Donnez, a professor of gynaecology at the Catholic University of Louvain in Brussels, said it was too early to draw firm conclusions but the procedure gave hope to women who had not had an opportunity to freeze either eggs or ovarian tissue before undergoing damaging cancer therapy.

"This method is an option for women who have not had their ovarian tissue cyropreserved (frozen)," Donnez said on Thursday.

The procedure could be used between two unrelated women, as long as they had compatible tissue types and had swapped bone marrow, he said.

Doctors went on to produce two embryos from eggs recovered from Alvaro's ovaries using in vitro fertilisation (IVF), although neither developed into a viable pregnancy.

Donnez, reporting her case in the journal Human Reproduction, said it was not clear why the embryos ceased to develop but noted this also happened during normal IVF treatment.

Alvaro herself is confident she will become pregnant.