Doctors successfully carried out India's first womb transplant in Pune

Image for representational purpose only

New Delhi: For the first time in the country, a team of doctors successfully performed a womb transplant on a 21-year-old woman on Thursday at a hospital in Pune.

The woman, who is a Solapur resident, suffers from congenital absence of uterus since birth and was fitted with her mother’s womb so that 21-year-old can conceive normally.

A team of 12 doctors conducted the complicated surgery at Pune’s Galaxy Care Laparoscopy Institute (GCLI) for nine hours.

The hospital has been granted a licence by the state's Directorate of Health Services to carry out the uterus transplant, as per a TOI report.

"The surgery has been successful. The condition of the recipient and donor is stable. Another 48 hours will be crucial in determining the outcome the surgery," said oncosurgeon Shailesh Puntambekar, was quoted as saying in the report, who performed the surgery along with other 11 doctors.

"Around 80 percent of the retrieval of organ (uterus) was done laparoscopically and only towards the tail end of the surgery when we had to take out the organ (womb) from donor's body that we adopted open surgery method by taking a small incision so that vessels supplying blood to the uterus are not squeezed and damaged,” he added.

The report also revealed that the minimally invasive retrieval of the womb carried out mainly through key hole surgery medically known as laparoscopic surgery, and its subsequent transplant performed only through open surgery took nine hours.

The woman is now under observation and will be kept in Intensive Care Unit for some days.

On Friday, May 19, the hospital will conduct another uterus transplant on a 24-year-old woman from Gujarat who suffers from Asherman’s Syndrome (scar tissue in the uterus) and will also receive her mother’s womb.