A baby with three parents has been born with a game-changing technique. New Scientist reports that five months ago, a baby boy was born to a Jordanian couple who had been trying to start a family for almost two decades. The mom became pregnant after 10 years of marriage, but she ended up having a miscarriage—the first of four.
She finally gave birth to a baby girl in 2005, and the couple discovered the reason behind their difficulty conceiving. The mother carried the genes for Leigh syndrome, a rare disorder that affects the central nervous system of infants and usually proves fatal within 2 to 3 years. Though the mother is perfectly healthy, the couple’s first two children died at the ages of 6 years and 8 months, respectively.
The couple asked for the help of Dr. John Zhang from the New Hope Fertility Center in New York City, who was researching ways of using the “three-parent” technique or spindle nuclear transfer to avoid diseases.
The procedure has been approved in the UK, but is still being considered in the US, according to Yahoo! Finance. And so, Zhang and his team went to Mexico, where medical procedures aren’t as strictly regulated.
“To save lives is the ethical thing to do,” he explained to New Science.
Read more about this amazing procedure on the next page.
Babies have been born with DNA from three parents before, but never before with the method that Zhang and his team used. The two earlier methods were cytoplasmic transfer, which was used in the ‘90s before it was halted because of safety and ethical concerns; and pronuclear transfer, which entails swapping nuclei after the mother’s and the donor’s eggs have been fertilized.
The pronuclear transfer was the method that has been approved in the UK, but was not suitable for the couple because it entailed destroying embryos. And so Zhang developed the spindle nuclear transfer, which removes the nucleus from the mother’s eggs then inserts it into a donor egg before fertilization.
“This is a milestone technique”
Photo: Dreamstime
This procedure avoids destroying embryos, and is thus more ethical than the previous two techniques. “It’s as good as or better than what we’ll do in the UK,” Sian Harding told New Scientist (Harding reviewed the ethics of the approved UK procedure).
Zhang and his team tested the baby boy’s mitchondria and found that less than 1% carry the Leigh syndrome mutation. Because it is believed that it takes 18% of mitochondria to cause problems, this is a good sign.
“This is a milestone technique,” Zhang told The Daily Mail. “It proves for the first time that genetic information from three people can avoid disease. We now know reconstitution of human eggs can produce a healthy baby. No other technique has been established.”
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