Before starting treatment that would destroy her ovaries, a 13-year-old girl in Belgium had a piece of ovarian tissue removed and frozen, years before she would ever need it, if she needed it at all.
The girl had received an aggressive conditioning regimen for sickle-cell disease that left her with ovarian failure, as it does in the large majority of children who undergo it. Years later, doctors at Erasme Hospital in Brussels reimplanted the frozen tissue, and it began working again.
The graft restored her hormone cycles and, eventually, her fertility, resulting in the first documented live birth from ovarian tissue that had been frozen before menarche. The technique offers a path for children facing fertility-damaging treatment, though it still requires surgery to remove tissue from a child too young to weigh the decision on her own. Long-term outcomes across more patients are still being gathered.
Read the original study
Demeestere et al., Human Reproduction, 2015 · doi.org/10.1093/humrep/dev128
Tissue frozen at 13 became a baby years later.
Source
- Demeestere, I., Simon, P., Dedeken, L., Moffa, F., Tsépélidis, S., Brachet, C., Delbaere, A., Devreker, F., & Ferster, A. (2015). Live birth after autograft of ovarian tissue cryopreserved during childhood. Human Reproduction, 30(9), 2107–9. https://doi.org/10.1093/humrep/dev128