Baby born to woman following an ovary transplant from her sister

Doctors in St. Louis say a woman whose ovaries stopped working when she was a teenager, after an ovary transplant from her identical twin sister, has given birth to a baby girl.

According to the medical team led by Sherman Silber of St. Luke's Hospital, the 24-year-old woman began having normal menstrual cycles three months after the transplant operation, and became pregnant two months later.

The doctors say that the surgery would probably remain rare, and came after two failed attempts at test tube fertilization using eggs donated by her sister.

Silber's team say that the successful outcome may open the possibility for female cancer patients facing treatments that could make them sterile to freeze their ovary tissue and reimplant it later to make them once again fertile.

Details of the operation are scheduled to be published next month in the New England Journal of Medicine, and are posted on the Journal's web site.