UK’s First 3-Parent Baby is Born

News Desk

United Kingdom: The first UK baby created with DNA from three people has been born after doctors performed a groundbreaking IVF procedure that aims to prevent children from inheriting incurable diseases.

The technique, known as mitochondrial donation treatment (MDT), uses tissue from the eggs of healthy female donors to create IVF embryos that are free from harmful mutations their mothers carry and are likely to pass on to their children.

Because the embryos combine sperm and eggs from the biological parents with tiny battery-like structures called mitochondria from the donor’s egg, the resulting baby has DNA from the mother and father as usual, plus a small amount of genetic material (about 37 genes) from the donor.

The process has led to the phrase ‘three-parent babies’, though more than 99.8 per cent of the DNA in the babies comes from the mother and father.

Research on MDT, which is also known as mitochondrial replacement therapy (MRT), was pioneered in the UK by doctors at the Newcastle Fertility Centre. The work aimed to help women with mutated mitochondria have babies without the risk of passing on genetic disorders. People inherit all their mitochondria from their mother, so harmful mutations in the “batteries” can affect all of the children a woman has.

For affected women, natural conception is often a gamble. Some babies might be born healthy because they inherit only a tiny proportion of the mutated mitochondria. But others may inherit far more and develop severe, progressive, and often fatal diseases. About one in 6,000 babies is affected by mitochondrial disorders.

In 2015, the UK became the world’s first country to adopt legislation specifically regulating methods to help prevent women with faulty mitochondria—the energy source in a cell—from passing defects on to their babies.

The genetic defects can result in diseases such as muscular dystrophy, epilepsy, heart problems, and intellectual disabilities. About one in 200 children in the UK is born with a mitochondrial disorder. To date, 32 patients have been authorised to receive such treatment.

Many critics have opposed the artificial reproduction techniques, arguing there are other ways for people to avoid passing on diseases to their children, such as egg donation or screening tests, and that the experimental methods have not yet been proven safe.