A woman whose ovaries were frozen when she was 18 after she was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer has become a mother at 44 following groundbreaking treatment.
Kassandra Bacon was just days away from her 19th birthday in 2001 when she was told she had a form of Hodgkin lymphoma, a rare blood cancer.
Despite her pleas for doctors to preserve her fertility, she was told she needed to start high-dose chemotherapy immediately in order to survive.
But Ms Bacon did not give up and she fought to have a quick experimental procedure at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, in Cambridge.
This involved freezing and storing a thin slice of her ovaries with the aim that one day in the future they could be transplanted back inside her.
Twenty-five years later, Ms Bacon gave birth to a baby boy on September 9 using the same ‘frozen in time’ ovaries.
In what is being hailed as a ‘global scientific milestone’, this is the longest time egg tissue has been stored before it has been transplanted back into a woman resulting in pregnancy.
And the procedure will give hope to thousands of women going through cancer treatment that leaves them infertile.
Pictured: Kassandra Bacon and her son David who she gave birth to 25 years after her eggs were frozen in what is being hailed as a ‘global scientific milestone’
Ms Bacon found out she was pregnant on Christmas Day in 2025
Ms Bacon’s eggs were frozen in May 2001, under the care of an NHS team led by Martyn Blayney, an embryologist, when it was still unproven whether the procedure would work.
It involved freezing tiny samples of ovarian tissue, which contains thousands of immature eggs.
This is then grafted back on to the ovaries years later in the hope it would respond to hormones and ‘switch back on’, re-establishing a menstrual cycle and releasing eggs.
Speaking about the birth of her baby boy, David, Ms Bacon told The Times: ‘I look down at him and it is a bit surreal. He is healthy, he’s thriving, he’s such a cool, calm, little man.
‘I just thank my younger self for being so determined. I was very maternal, I just wanted to be a mother.’
Ms Bacon survived the cancer but the treatment – including a bone marrow transplant and chemotherapy – had caused irreparable damage to her ovaries and when, at 32, Ms Bacon and her partner decided they wanted to start a family she received the devastating news she was ‘menopausal with no viable follicles’.
But the determined Ms Bacon started a decade-long fight to find a doctor willing to perform the transplant.
The aspiring mother had consultations with eight separate fertility specialists in the UK and Brussels. But they all turned her away.
The main issue was that it lacked the relevant paperwork, as the samples of her ovary were frozen before the UK introduced regulations on tissue storage in 2007.
She eventually found Professor Dror Meirow at the Sheba Medical Centre in Israel, who agreed to carry out the transplant and Ms Bacon’s tissue was transported to Israel having spent two decades at Bourn Hall Fertility Clinic in Cambridge.
But, in another twist in her long journey to motherhood, Ms Bacon’s journey to Israel was delayed following the October 7 attacks and the beginning of the war in Gaza.
In May 2024, it was safe enough to travel to Israel and she had an operation to transplant her younger self’s ovarian tissue back to her ovaries.
Months later, she got her period for the first time in years which showed the procedure had worked and on Christmas Day she found out she was pregnant.
The decade-long treatment path was entirely self-funded and cost Ms Bacon £50,000.
She has started a Go Fund Me to cover the costs of the treatment.
Ms Bacon stressed that fertility restoration shouldn’t ‘depend on whether somebody can find the money’.
Dr Sara Matthews, a consultant gynaecologist in London who helped Ms Bacon, said the procedure was a ‘scientific milestone’ and she urged the NHS to provide funding to carry out ovarian tissue transplants for other women.
‘The NHS committed to doing the [ovarian tissue storage] in the first place, they should at least commit to putting it back in for them,’ she said.
The first live birth from an ovarian transplantation was in 2004, and since then about 350 babies have been born worldwide from women who have undergone the treatment.
