Looks like it’s working! last weekA team in Switzerland shared the news that a baby was born after his mother had the procedure. Gyno-oncologist Daniela Huber, who performed the operation, says that baby Lucien was the fifth child born after the surgery and the first in Europe. Since then, at least three others have been born, says Riton Ribeiro, the surgeon who originated the procedure. He told me the details.
Huber’s patient was 28 years old when a four-centimeter tumor was found in her rectum. Doctors at Sion Hospital in Switzerland, where Huber works, recommended a course of treatment that included several medications and radiotherapy – the use of rays of energy to shrink the tumor – before surgery to remove the tumor.
This type of radiation can kill tumor cells, says Huber, but it can also damage other organs in the pelvis. It includes the ovaries and uterus. She says people who undergo these treatments may choose to freeze their eggs beforehand, but the damage to the uterus would mean they would never be able to conceive. Damage to the lining of the uterus makes it difficult for a fertilized egg to implant there and the uterine muscles become unable to stretch, she says.
In this case, the woman decided she wanted to freeze her eggs. But it would have been difficult to access them later—surrogacy is illegal in Switzerland.
Huber offered him an alternative.
She was following the work of Ribeiro, a gynecologic oncologist formerly at Erasto Gaertner Hospital in Curitiba, Brazil. There, Ribeiro pioneered a new type of surgery that involved moving the uterus, fallopian tubes, and ovaries from their position in the pelvis and temporarily hiding them in the upper abdomen beneath the ribs.
Ribeiro and colleagues published His first case report in 2017A 26-year-old man has been reported to be suffering from a rectal tumour. (Ribeiro, who now works at McGill University in Montreal, says the woman was told by several doctors that her cancer treatment would destroy her fertility and that they urged her to find a way to preserve it.)
