Britain’s first three-parent baby could bring new hope to women trying to conceive.
Many women who repeatedly fail to start a family through IVF have poor quality eggs that prevent the treatment from working.
This leaves them with the difficult choice of giving up or instead having a baby who is not biologically related to them.
But this week’s revelation that the UK’s first ‘three-parent babies’ have been born raises hopes that a breakthrough technique could help thousands of childless couples in the future.
The children were each created in a groundbreaking IVF procedure, using the egg of a second woman, who was not their mother, who was ’emptied’ to insert the mother’s genetic material.
British scientists devised the new IVF technique, in which the child has genetic material from three people, but does not inherit any characteristics from the donor. Opponents include the Church of England
History in the Making: Dr. John Zhang in a Mexican hospital with the world’s only confirmed three-parent baby after birth in 2016
Britain’s first three-parent baby has been born using a groundbreaking IVF procedure
This was done to prevent mothers from passing on a hereditary disease carried in their own egg – so far the only legal use of the procedure in the UK.
But according to leading fertility expert Dr Dagan Wells of the University of Oxford, the technique could also help people conceive who would never do so with conventional IVF.
He is lead author of a study using the technique, called mitochondrial donation, in 25 childless women with a combined 159 failed IVF attempts.
After putting genetic material from their egg into the egg of a second, younger woman, six of the women had a baby.
The children, followed up to the age of two, were healthy, with normal growth and development.
Although they are referred to as “three-parent babies,” DNA analysis confirmed that the second woman who donated her egg was in no way related to each child.
Concerns about the tech remain, with Christian charity Care warning that an “ethical boundary” has been crossed and could pave the way for a future of “designer babies” who are genetically modified.
In order for mitochondrial donation to help infertile couples to be used, the law in the UK needs to be changed and larger studies need to be done.
But Dr Dagan Wells said: ‘Our study has produced encouraging results, with women having babies after several years of failed IVF treatments.
‘Now further studies are needed to confirm whether this really works.
“But the egg is responsible for carrying an embryo for the first few days of its life and provides all the resources it needs.
‘So placing a woman’s genetic material in the egg cell of a fertile donor can increase the chance of pregnancy.’
Conventional IVF involves giving a woman drugs to make her produce more than the usual one egg per month, and then fertilizing the eggs she produces with her partner’s sperm.
The fertilized eggs are much like those created during sex, but are grown into ’embryos’ in the lab for a few days before being placed inside the woman’s body to hopefully cling to her uterus, getting her pregnant to make and grow into a baby.
IVF is successful in about 25 percent of cases, but it often fails because women have poor quality eggs that sperm can’t fertilize, or embryos don’t grow well.
Experts suspect that mitochondrial donation may be a solution for some of these women.
So far it has been used in the UK for fewer than five women who are at risk of passing on mitochondrial diseases such as muscular dystrophy to their children, by extracting the genetic material from their egg, but not the little ‘engine rooms’ in the cells that called mitochondria. who carry diseases.
However, using a second egg in the procedure may also provide biological ingredients that are vital to help develop an embryo to increase the chances of pregnancy for some childless women with no risk of passing on mitochondrial disease.
The study included 25 women in Greece under the age of 40, with unexplained infertility, who had tried unsuccessfully up to 11 times to have a baby using IVF.
They were not at any risk of passing on mitochondrial disease to their children, unlike those in the UK who have received treatment through the Newcastle Fertility Center at Life.
Mitochondrial donation allowed them to avoid using a donated egg to conceive, rather than their own, which would more likely work, but would mean any baby born would not be biologically related to them.
The results of the study, published in the journal Fertility and Sterility, show that seven women became pregnant, with one woman miscarrying but six babies being born.
Peter Thompson, chief executive of the HFEA, which regulates fertility in the UK, said: ‘Only people who are at very high risk of passing on a serious mitochondrial disease to their children are eligible for this treatment in the UK .’
He added: ‘These are still early days for mitochondrial donation treatment and the HFEA continues to review clinical and scientific developments.’