In a remarkable breakthrough, scientists in the UK used a three-person in vitro fertilization (IVF) technique to bring to life eight children and spared them from genetic mitochondrial disease.
The infants-four girls and four boys, including one set of identical twins-were born using DNA from three people. Researchers from Newcastle University in the UK said, the babies were born to seven women at high risk of transmitting serious disease caused by mutations in mitochondrial DNA.
They said, all babies were healthy at birth, meeting their developmental milestones. Researchers said, the mother’s disease-causing mitochondrial DNA mutations were either undetectable or present at levels that are very unlikely to cause disease.
The pioneering study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, describes the technique where the nucleus from the mother’s fertilised egg, along with the nucleus of the father’s sperm, is transferred into a healthy egg provided by an anonymous donor. Mitochondrial donation technologies are currently regarded as risk-reduction treatments owing to the carryover of maternal mitochondrial DNA during the mitochondrial donation procedure.
Eight babies have been born in the UK using genetic material from three people to prevent devastating and often fatal conditions, doctors say.
The method, pioneered by UK scientists, combines the egg and sperm from a mum and dad with a second egg from a donor woman.
The technique has been legal here for a decade but we now have the first proof it is leading to children born free of incurable mitochondrial disease. These conditions are normally passed from mother to child, starving the body of energy.
This can cause severe disability and some babies die within days of being born. Couples know they are at risk if previous children, family members or the mother has been affected.
Children born through the three-person technique inherit most of their DNA, their genetic blueprint, from their parents, but also get a tiny amount, about 0.1%, from the second woman. This is a change that is passed down the generations.
None of the families who have been through the process are speaking publicly to protect their privacy, but have issued anonymous statements through the Newcastle Fertility Centre where the procedures took place.