Dancer gets first ovarian-tissue transplant.

A 30-year-old ballet dancer leapt into the public eye this week when physicians announced that they had transplanted back some of her own ovarian tissue, restoring her ability to ovulate. The woman had had both ovaries removed for medical reasons but had the foresight to preserve tissue from one ovary.

The researchers have not yet shown that the dancer's eggs are fertile. Still, this first-of-its-kind operation raises the hope that women about to undergo radiation or chemotherapy, procedures that often destroy egg cells, might bank ovarian tissue and receive it later if they desire children.

The novel procedure, conducted by Kutluk Otkay of New York Methodist Hospital, also grabbed headlines because some scientists have speculated that ovarian-tissue transplants may one day allow women to delay menopause and extend their fertility.

When the dancer was 17, one of her ovaries developed cysts, so surgeons removed it. In 1998, the woman had her other ovary taken out for an undisclosed reason and began hormone-replacement therapy. Before that surgery, she asked her physicians to freeze egg-containing slices from the ovary.

Later displeased with the hormone therapy, the woman searched through the medical literature. She found that Otkay, working with Roger Gosden at the University of Leeds in England, had transplanted thawed human ovarian tissue into mice to study whether eggs would survive the procedure. In February, Otkay thawed and stitched together 80 of the woman's ovarian slices and positioned them near the site of the original ovary.

In June, he gave the dancer fertility hormones designed to stimulate the maturation and release of eggs. The woman ovulated and had one normal menstrual period, Otkay announced this week at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine meeting in Toronto.

In the past few years, some physicians have offered women facing radiation or chemotherapy the option of freezing ovarian tissue. While scientists have achieved a few pregnancies with mature eggs that were frozen, ovarian-tissue slices are easier to obtain, and the immature eggs within survive the freezing better.

It's unclear how long the woman's apparent fertility will last. Moreover, mouse studies have raised a concern that frozen ovarian tissue from a cancer patient might harbor roaming tumor cells, notes John J. Eppig of Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, who studies how eggs develop in the ovaries.