Baylor University Medical Center at Dallas hopes to become one of the first hospitals in the U.S. to transplant a uterus from one woman to another.
Today doctors announced a new clinical trial that will implant wombs in 10 women who either don’t have a uterus of their own, or whose uterus is not working.
Dr. Giuliano Testa, surgical chief of abdominal transplantation at Baylor, will lead the study.
“We’re very excited about this new adventure,” he says. “I think at the end it will benefit many woman who have no access to carry their pregnancies.”
Baylor will begin screening candidates next week. Nurse Kristin Posey Wallis says they’ll be looking for candidates between 20 and 35 years of age.
“We want them to be physically fit and healthy,” she says. “They need to have working ovaries, which will help us have embryos, and no major medical surgery history that would keep them from carrying a baby to term.”
Once the women have given birth to one or two children, doctors will remove the uterus so patients can stop taking anti-rejection drugs — drugs which can come with serious unwanted side effects.
A similar trial in Sweden resulted in seven womb transplants and five live births. The team at Baylor University Medical Center will apply insights of those outcomes to this study, with special input from the researchers involved in the initial effort at Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Gothenburg.
