Swedish Doctors Transplant Wombs into 9 Women

(Image credit: Uterus diagram via Shutterstock)

Nine women in Sweden have received womb transplants, using organs donated from living relatives, according to news reports.

Each woman who underwent the surgery was either born without a uterus, or had it removed because of cervical cancer. They will soon try to become pregnant.

"This is a new kind of surgery," Dr. Mats Brannstrom who led the team of doctors at the University of Gothenburg, told The Associated Press.

There have been previous attempts to transplant a womb, but the women have not given birth.

In the new trial, doctors plan to transfer embryos made through in vitro fertilization into the transplanted wombs, potentially allowing the women to become pregnant and carry their biological children.

If the women have successful pregnancies, this will show the treatment could help many others, the doctors told news media. About 1 in 4,500 girls are born without a uterus, a syndrome known as MRKH, and about 40 percent of women who develop cervical cancer are in childbearing age.

Email Bahar Gholipour. Follow us @LiveScience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.

Bahar Gholipour is a staff reporter for Live Science covering neuroscience, odd medical cases and all things health. She holds a Master of Science degree in neuroscience from the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris, and has done graduate-level work in science journalism at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She has worked as a research assistant at the Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives at ENS.