The first U.K. baby created using three people’s DNA was born following a groundbreaking IVF procedure which aims to prevent children from inheriting incurable diseases.
Embryos combine sperm and egg from the biological parent’s mitochondria from the donor’s egg. Using the new IVF treatment, outside of the parent’s DNA, a small amount of genetic material from the donor is also used. The procedure does not affect attributes such as appearance, and 99.8% of the genes still come from the mother and father.
The donor cannot be classified as a parent, as only about 37 genes donor genes are used.
Mitochondria are small chambers inside nearly every body cell that convert food into valuable energy by combining oxygen with fuel molecules. When defective, mitochondria fail to fuel the body, leading to brain damage, muscle deterioration, heart failure and even blindness. Mitochondrial diseases are passed down only by the mother. About 1,000 to 4,000 children in the U.S. are born with mitochondrial disease yearly.
While this is the first birth of its kind in the U.K., the world’s first baby was born using a new “three-person” fertility technique in 2016. In 2019, the Institute of Life in Athens, Greece, announced that a healthy baby boy had been born with DNA from three people. The child was born to a 32-year-old woman who previously failed four IVF cycles. To date, less than five have been born using the technique.
“The number of reported cases is far too small to draw any definitive conclusions about the safety or efficacy,” Dagan Wells, a professor of reproductive genetics at the University of Oxford, who took part in the research, told The Guardian. “Long-term follow-up of the children born is essential.”
The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) says that anyone at very high risk of passing serious mitochondrial disease onto their children could be eligible for treatment.
