Doctors are preparing to carry out what they hope will be the world’s first successful womb transplant.

Giuseppe Del Priore, from Downtown Hospital in New York, has been given permission to perform the procedure and claims to have found a number of potential donors.

Last month Dr Del Priore’s team performed a successful womb transplant in a rhesus monkey. The monkey was monitored for only 20 hours, and did not get pregnant. However, its new uterus had a healthy blood supply and the drugs given to prevent rejection by the animal’s immune system appeared to work.

Enough research has now been done to consider the procedure safe for women, according to Dr Del Priore. “If a person walked in tomorrow and requested a uterine transplant, I am cautiously optimistic that we could be successful,” he told New Scientist magazine.

Dr Mats Brannstrom, from Gothenburg University, in Sweden, who has been working on womb transplants for six years, said: “We have to do a lot more animal studies before we go on to humans.”

He believes that transplanting a womb into a woman before achieving a successful pregnancy in a non-human primate would put patients at unnecessary risk.

The first attempt to transplant a womb was made in Saudi Arabia in 2000 when a 26-year-old woman received the womb of a woman 20 years older who had undergone a hysterectomy. However, it had to be removed 99 days later because of clotting in the connecting blood vessels.

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