Miracle baby for cancer patient

a dream come true for new mother Ouarda Touirat, who after having being made infertile by chemotherapy due to cancer, gave birth to a baby girl thanks to a medical first ovarian tissue transplant.

“I was crying at first, it’s a dream ... a big miracle,” said the 32-year old mother of baby Tamara, who was born on Thursday at Brussels’ Cliniques Universitaires Saint-Luc hospital.

“I am very happy, it’s what I always wanted,” said Mrs Touirat, who presented her healthy 8.2lb baby at a press conference at the hospital.

Doctors believe with the birth they have broken new ground in women’s health, in a procedure that could one day allow women to delay motherhood beyond the menopause.

“This is the first time that the tissue was cryo-preserved, removed before chemotherapy and was successfully implanted,” said Dr Jacques Donnez, head of the Department of Gynaecology and Andrology at the hospital, who led the procedure.

“It is a big message of hope for all women with cancer who have to go and have chemotherapy.”

Dr Donnez said Mrs Touirat’s fertility was restored after doctors cut out and froze some of her ovarian tissue and transplanted it back into her body years later.

“When I proposed the ovarian graft to the patient we had no idea it was working or not, we just had experimental studies in animals,” he said.

He said a total of 146 women were undergoing the same procedure, “but Mrs Touirat was one of the first in 1997 who has undergone ... the cryopreservation”.

Dr Donnez removed the ovarian tissue from Mrs Touirat before she underwent chemotherapy and radiation for Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 1997.

Five years after Mrs Touirat, a former waitress, was cleared of cancer, the tissue was grafted back onto her fallopian tubes after she said she wanted to have a baby. Dr Donnez said she fell pregnant naturally.

The technique, described in the Lancet, involved cutting 12-15 millimetres long, 5mm wide samples from the one of the two ovaries and freezing them in liquid nitrogen.

The tissue was later transplanted back into the body, allowing for a natural pregnancy.