Birth breakthrough offers hope for girls needing chemotherapy

More than a decade ago, a 14-year-old Belgian girl was left infertile after going through a bone marrow transplant to treat sickle-cell anaemia, a condition she was diagnosed with at age five.

In November last year, at 27 years old, the woman gave birth to a healthy baby boy after receiving a different kind of transplant: the reimplantation of her ovarian tissue that was extracted and frozen before she embarked on the cancer treatment.

What is so significant about this case is that the patient had not begun ovulating when her immature ovary was removed in her early teens.

Previously, cryopreserved ovarian tissue was used only to produce healthy pregnancies in women who had the tissue removed in adulthood. In 2004, another Belgian woman became the first to give birth to a healthy baby, seven years after banking her frozen ovarian tissue before starting chemotherapy.

"This is an important breakthrough in the field because children are the patients who are most likely to benefit from the procedure in the future," says Dr Isabelle Demeestere, a gynaecologist at Erasme Hospital in Brussels who led the medical team that restored the patient's fertility.

"When they are diagnosed with diseases that require treatment that can destroy ovarian function, freezing ovarian tissue is the only available option for preserving their fertility."