Within a few hours of Baylor University Medical Center announcing two weeks ago that it had successfully delivered the first baby in the U.S. to a mother who had undergone a uterine transplant, inquiries began pouring in to the facility.

In just one week, Baylor logged nearly 400 calls and emails from potential donors and recipients.

Kristin Posey Wallis, uterus transplant nurse, has been busy returning phone calls to interested participants in Baylor's successful uterine transplant clinical trial. (Ron Baselice / Staff Photographer)

As she sits in her office at the Baylor transplant center in Dallas, uterine transplant nurse Kristin Posey Wallis sifts through the messages. She adds each name to a spreadsheet and then begins the process of calling each person back, one by one.

As the clinical trial nurse coordinator, hers is the first voice from Baylor they’ll hear.

The people who make it through this first line of screening may be the next to enroll in the ongoing study that aims to create an option for women suffering from absolute uterine infertility, who until recently, had no hope of carrying a baby.

Right now, there are 10 enrolled in Baylor's clinical trial, and two still are awaiting donor uteruses. The center hopes to eventually extend the trial, but the focus now is to ensure each current participant receives a uterus.

Contacting those who want to participate is a slow process that can take days of leaving voicemails and awaiting call returns. The inquiries have mostly been from women who want to receive a uterus, or from men who are married to women who can’t give birth, and want to see if their wives may qualify.

“They're waiting by the phone,” explained Wallis.

However, not all of the more than 270 who want to be recipients are women. Baylor says that it has also received messages from transgender individuals, including those in the process of transitioning to become a woman. But those individuals don’t qualify for the trial, and the potential for this type of surgery in transgender women has not yet been tested.

When Baylor announced plans to conduct the trial in 2016, the North Texas center became the first in the nation to attempt uterine transplantation using living donors.

Wallis is starting by returning calls to potential donors, a much harder group to nail down. About a third of the recent inquiries are from women who are interested in giving away their uterus.

But given the complex nature of the trial, the rate of attrition is high.

"It comes down to whether or not they meet criteria," Wallis said. "And whether or not they are still interested after I explain the seriousness of it."

The process is rigorous. Wallis prescreens the women before they're invited to Dallas to go over the extensive consent process, meet one-on-one with transplant surgeons and OB-GYNs and be interviewed by a psychologist.

“We look at personality, coping style, how someone handles stress, how resilient someone is,” explained Ann Marie Warren, a licensed clinical psychologist who helps to screen candidates for the uterine transplant trial.

The screening can include hours of clinical interviews, plus conversations about hypothetical scenarios that one might experience during different parts of the trial. “We want to make sure there are no underlying psychiatric problems that would interfere with being a good candidate for the study,” Warren said.

In the end, only a fraction of those who express interest may be the right candidates for the trial.

Baylor also notes that people who work in medicine, particularly nurses, have been “significant” on the list of volunteer participants. Part of that stems from what drove them to the profession in the first place, Wallis said. “It’s a giving role — they like to care for people,” she said.

And they also are more comfortable with medical procedures. “They understand what goes into surgery and the ins and outs of the hospital. So it doesn’t scare them as much,” she said.

For more information about the trial, go to www.bswhealth.com/uterus-transplant.