Sisters Swap Ovaries
August 2nd 2007
Doctors today reported the first live ovarian transplant between two women who are not genetically identical. 
Sisters Teresa and Sandra underwent the procedure after being told they could donate eggs to each other. Instead they insisted on an ovary transplant.
It was the second time Sandra had donated tissue to her elder sister Teresa Alvaro who developed severe beta-thalassaemia at the age of 20 in 1990.
The first donation was a bone marrow transplant but 15 years later the sisters were talking about how they could give Sandra a baby.
Aged 35, Mrs Alvaro went to an expert in Brussels, Belgium, having decided, with her sister, to press for an ovarian tissue transplant.
The procedure has been used successfully with identical twin sisters.
Reporting in the journal Human Reproduction, the doctors say the procedure was successful but so far there are no offspring. Attempts at assisted reproduction have so far been unsuccessful.
Researcher Professor Jacques Donnez, of the Catholic University of Louvain in Brussels, Belgium, said: "She preferred a transplant because she wanted to be ’responsible’ for the follicular maturation and considered that it was more natural than egg donation, for which her sister would have to undergo ovarian stimulation with follicle stimulating hormones and then oocyte retrieval.
He said: "In theory, the procedure could also be used between two, unrelated women, as long as the two women were HLA compatible and if the donor had previously given bone marrow to the recipient, as in the case we are reporting here.
"This method is an option for women who have not had their ovarian tissue cryopreserved, either because chemotherapy was given before 1996, or because cryopreservation was not proposed or not available in the hospital where the patient was treated."
Mrs Alvaro said: "I can get pregnant the natural way. That’s something I could never have hoped for a couple of years ago."
Human Reproduction. doi:10.1093/humrep/dem211
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