A 36-year-old Swede has become the world’s first woman to give birth after receiving a womb transplant, medical journal The Lancet said. She had a genetic condition called Rokitansky syndrome which meant she was born without a womb, although her ovaries were intact. The healthy baby boy was born in September 2014 and both mother and infant were doing well.

Weighing 1.775kg (3.9 pounds), the baby was born by Caesarean section at 31 weeks after the mother developed preeclampsia.

The surgeons said the feat smashes through the last major barrier of female infertility – the absence of a uterus as a result of heredity or surgical removal for medical reasons. The replacement organ came from a 61-year-old woman, a  close family friend who had been through menopause seven years earlier. The organ was transplanted in a 10-hour operation. The womb encountered a brief episode of rejection, but this was successfully tackled by increasing the dose of corticosteroid drugs to suppress the immune system.

The recipient underwent in-vitro fertilization, in which eggs were harvested from her ovaries and fertilized using sperm from her partner, and then cryogenically preserved. A year after the transplant, a single early-stage embryo was inserted into the transplanted womb. A pregnancy test three weeks later was positive.