"It's almost science fiction ... it's phenomenal,"
MIRACLE MUM: Vali, pictured with her partner
Dean, has become the world's first woman to fall pregnant from ovarian
tissue grafted outside her pelvis. Pic: Melbourne IVF
12:25 PM Tuesday Sep 3, 2013
Australian doctors (click here) have achieved a world first by helping a woman become pregnant from ovarian tissue grafted into her abdomen.
The woman asked for the tissue to be frozen seven years ago, when her second ovary was removed because of cancer.
Now
she is 25 weeks' pregnant with twin girls, thanks to work carried out
by fertility preservation scientists at Melbourne IVF and The Royal
Women's Hospital.
"It's two girls. We're pretty excited. A bit freaked out," says the mum-to-be, identified only as Vali.
In
a voice recording released to the media by Melbourne IVF, Vali says she
is lucky her doctor offered her an opportunity to freeze tissue.
She did not fully understand the implications at the time but hoped it would one day allow her to have a baby.
"It's almost science fiction ... it's phenomenal," says proud dad-to-be Dean....
Women should save their lives in reassurance of their future families. What was medical theory is now practice.
Ovariectomy and ovarian tissue cryopreservation has the
potential to preserve the natural fertility of cancer patients prior to
sterilizing chemo- and radiotherapies. Ovarian tissue cryopreservation
with the conventional slow-freezing method has yielded limited success,
partly because of oocyte loss during freeze–thaw and subsequent
transplant. Based on the high-efficiency vitrification Cryotop method, a
practical vitrification
procedure for murine, bovine and human ovarian tissue was developed. A
Cryotissue method was designed for cryopreservation of ovarian tissue,
and vitrification experiments were performed in a bovine animal model
with ovarian size and structure similar to the human. There was no
difference in oocyte viability (>89%) between fresh and vitrified
ovarian cortical tissue in either bovine or human samples. Ovarian
tissue was successfully autotransplanted to six cattle.
Autotransplantation of vitrified–warmed tissue back to the cattle
resulted in no loss of oocyte viability. In addition, human ovarian
tissue from cancer patients, and from ovary transplant
donors was also vitrified by the Cryotissue method. After warming,
high oocyte survival in human tissue (similar to bovine tissue) was
obtained. These results indicate that an ultra-rapid cooling
vitrification method has the potential for clinical use in human ovarian
tissue cryopreservation.
