BELGIUM: Ms Ouarda Touirat, her day-old baby daughter nestling in her arms, said yesterday she had never lost hope that she could conceive after cancer treatment left her infertile.
"I always hoped it would happen," the 32-year-old told a news conference as she cradled Tamara. "It's a message of hope and at the same time a miracle for us."
Touirat is the first woman to have a baby after receiving an ovarian tissue transplant, a medical breakthrough that gives hope to other female cancer sufferers who want to have children after surviving the disease.
Touirat was diagnosed with Stage IV Hodgkin's lymphoma in 1997, shortly after getting married.
Belgian doctors proposed a revolutionary way of preserving her fertility before treating her cancer with chemotherapy, which damages the ovaries, stopping women from menstruating and producing eggs.
They removed part of her ovarian tissue, froze it and then re-implanted it six years later once she was cured of cancer and wanted to have a baby.
Touirat started to have her periods again, conceived naturally and became pregnant. Tamara was born on Thursday in a Brussels hospital, weighing 3.75 kg (8.2 lb).
Professor Jacques Donnez, head of the Department of Gynaecology and Andrology at the Cliniques Universitaires Saint-Luc and the medical team's leader, said the breakthrough gave new hope to young female cancer sufferers.
"Everyone who receives chemotherapy for a cancer should be offered the different options for fertility preservation," he told a news conference.
"We're not only doctors in order to save lives, but also to preserve quality of life." In vitro fertilisation of a donated egg would have offered Touirat her only other chance to have a baby if she not undergone the ovarian tissue graft.
Prof Donnez said 146 women have stored their ovarian tissue in a bank at the hospital and that a second ovarian tissue graft took place at the end of August.
The researchers published an article in the medical journal the Lancet (www.lancet.com), which gives details of the procedure of ovarian tissue cryopreservation.
Using keyhole surgery, Prof Donnez and his team took cells from Touirat's left ovary, cooled them to minus 196 degrees centigrade and stored them in liquid nitrogen.
Women are born with a finite number of eggs which are formed in follicles in the ovaries. The number of eggs diminish as a woman ages, until there are very few left and menopause begins.
Other teams of scientists have been working on ovarian transplantation, but the Belgian team said they were the first to achieve a birth.