The first British baby with DNA (genetic material) from three people was born after doctors carried out an innovative in vitro fertilization procedure that aims to prevent children from inheriting incurable diseases.
The feat, which is no precedent, was published in the online edition of the newspaper on Tuesday The protector and is quoted by international news agencies this Wednesday.
The technique, known as mitochondrial donation treatment and which enabled the birth of the world’s first baby in Mexico in 2016 with this procedure, uses egg tissue from healthy donors to create embryos that are free of harmful genetic mutations that mothers are likely to pass on to their offspring children.
According to the article by The protectorthe embryos thus generated by this technique combine the genetic material of the sperm and egg of the biological parents with that of the healthy mitochondria (cell organelles) of the donor’s egg.
As always, the baby born has DNA (more than 99.8%) from the mother and father, but also a small amount of genetic material – about 37 genes – from a donor.
The British authority on fertilization and human embryology, quoted by the same newspaper, said, without citing reasons of confidentiality, that the number of babies born thanks to the same ‘in vitro’ fertilization technique was “fewer than five” .
UK law was amended in 2015 to allow mitochondrial donation treatment, with Newcastle Fertility Center being the only institution in the country licensed to do so.
According to The Guardian, the regulator has approved this treatment for at least 30 cases.
The procedure helps women with mitochondria with harmful genetic mutations to have children without the risk of transmitting diseases to them (mitochondria are inherited from mothers by all people).
The father’s sperm is used to fertilize eggs from the affected mother and a healthy donor.
Then the nuclear genetic material is removed from the donor’s egg and replaced with that from the couple’s fertilized egg, which contains the DNA of both parents and the healthy mitochondria of the donor instead of the defective mitochondria of the mother.
This egg is then transplanted into the mother’s uterus.
According to studies, the technique is not without risks: a small number of abnormal mitochondria that are inevitably transferred from the mother’s egg to the donor’s egg can multiply when the baby is in the mother’s womb, making the child sick .
In 2016, an American doctor announced the birth, in Mexico, of the first baby born with mitochondrial donation.
Before the doctor’s treatment, the baby’s mother had four miscarriages and two children, ages eight months and six years, died.
The woman had mitochondria with genetic mutations that cause Leigh’s syndrome, a rare inherited neurodegenerative disease that affects the central nervous system and can be fatal.
Source: DN
