A 27-year-old Belgian woman, who was left infertile after chemotherapy she had received at the age of 13, gave birth to a healthy baby boy earlier this year after using a groundbreaking procedure that reimplanted ovarian tissue she had frozen nearly 14 years ago.

When she was 13, the unidentified woman had portions of her ovaries frozen, with the hope that one day she could use that tissue to help her conceive a child. The procedure previously had already been proven to work if women had already started menstruating, it had yet to be proven to work in children.

The case was detailed in a recent article in the journal Human Reproduction. The woman in question arrived in Belgium from the Congo at age 11, suffering from severe sickle cell anemia. In order to help the girl, physicians recommended the girl receive a stem cell transplant from her sibling. However, in order to perform the transplant, the girl's immune system had to be completely wiped out with chemotherapy, which would also damage her ovaries.

The girl's doctors froze her ovarian tissue, but they were unsure whether or not it would work and produce eggs when implanted as an adult. Ten years after completing her chemotherapy her remaining ovary failed, so she had the tissue grafted.

Two years later, the woman was able to naturally conceive her child and deliver a healthy baby in November.

Dr. Isabelle Demeestere, lead author on the study and a research associate in the Fertility Clinic and Research Laboratory on Human Reproduction at Erasme Hospital, University Libre of Brussels in Belgium, said more study was needed but that the success of the procedure was an important first step.

"This is an important breakthrough in the field because children are the patients who are most likely to benefit from the procedure in the future," Demeestere says. "When they are diagnosed with diseases that require treatment that can destroy ovarian function, freezing ovarian tissue is the only available option for preserving their fertility."

Dr. Kutluk Oktay, a fertility specialist and a professor at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at New York Medical College in Valhalla, New York, who helped development the treatment in the late '90s, said this success could give hope to people or parents of young children going through procedures that could render them infertile.

"In another sense it shows the importance of this technique in children," said Oktay, who has taken tissue from children as young as 1 in hopes of helping them retain their fertility as they get older. "Part or whole of an ovary can be removed and frozen in small slivers."