Word: transplant
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...month after performing the whole-ovary transplant, Silber tried the same procedure on a set of nonidentical twins for the first time. The recipient of the ovary, a San Francisco woman named Joy Lagos, had become infertile after cancer treatment. But the hope was that because Lagos had received a bone-marrow transplant from her older sister as part of that treatment - which transformed Lagos' immune system into a chimera, or hybrid, of her sister's and her own cells - her combination immune system would stand a far better chance of accepting her sister's ovary without the need...
...procedure went off without a hitch. But several months later, Lagos' hormones began reverting to menopausal levels. The ovary failed. In October 2007 she tried again, with a cortical-tissue transplant from her sister, harvested during the earlier procedure. Six months later, Lagos got her period for the first time in years. "This means that the ovary is working and we can start trying to get pregnant for real!" she wrote ecstatically on the blog she shares with her husband. But by summer, Lagos learned that the second transplant had also failed. Silber concluded it was most likely an organ...
...says, the technique could work between sisters or even strangers. "We know that's a safe thing to do," Silber says, citing the many published cases of babies born to women on long-term immunosuppressants. And because ovaries are not vital organs, he says, the immunosuppressant regimen for ovary-transplant patients would be much more modest than average. "If it doesn't work, we're not going to take a chance with their life as we would with a kidney or a liver," he says...
Read about last year's face-transplant breakthrough...
...using immunosuppressant therapy at all for nonlifesaving transplants lies in murky ethical territory, says Dr. Roger Gosden, director of reproductive-biology research at Cornell's Center for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility. Gosden, who did early research in ovarian transplantation in sheep and has co-authored several papers with Silber, says it's difficult to justify such drastic measures when there are so many other avenues to motherhood - adoption, surrogacy, egg donation. What's more, the prospect of a lifetime of drug therapy and its impact on the patient need to be heavily weighed, he says. "I suppose you could...