On Oct. 3, 2014, the University of Gothenburg announced that seven Swedish women in a ground-breaking research project have had embryos reintroduced after receiving wombs from living donors. Now the first transplanted woman has delivered a baby – a healthy and normally developed boy.

The world-unique birth was acknowledged in The Lancet on 5 October.

The uterus transplantation research project at the University of Gothenburg started in 1999 and has been evaluated in over 40 scientific articles. The goal of the Gothenburg project is to enable women who were born without a womb or who have lost their wombs in cancer surgery to give birth to their children.

Nine women in the project have received a womb from live donors – in most cases the recipient’s mother but also other family members and close friends. The transplanted uterus was removed in two cases, in one case due to a serious infection and in the other due to blood clots in the transplanted blood vessels.

The seven remaining women have in 2014 tried to become pregnant through a process where their embryos, produced through IVF, are reintroduced to the transplanted uterus. The first early pregnancy was confirmed in the spring after a successful first pregnancy attempt in a woman in her mid-30s, a little over a year after her transplantation.

In early September, the woman successfully delivered a baby by caesarean section, making her the first woman in the world to deliver a child from a transplanted uterus. Her uterus was donated by a 61-year-old unrelated woman. The caesarean section had to be performed earlier than planned: the woman developed preeclampsia in week 32 of her pregnancy the CTG indicated that the baby was under stress. A caesarean section was performed by normal clinical routines so as not to risk the health of the mother and child.

The researchers in the project are carefully monitoring several medical, psychological and quality-of-life-related parameters. Uterine infertility, which affects over 200,000 European women, is the only form of female infertility that until now has lacked effective treatment.