Call to donate unused eggs from IVF to research

called mitochondrial donation – also known as threeparent IVF.

Under the current system, if a woman hasn’t used her stored eggs after 10 years she has the option of extending their storage, donating them to help another would-be parent conceive, or having them discarded. If a woman can’t be contacted at the 10-year mark her eggs are automatically discarded.

‘‘These eggs are a source of precious biological material that could ultimately help other women conceive healthy, genetically related children,’’ Mills said.

‘‘Instead, they are just being thrown out, not because people request it but because they didn’t request anything else.

‘‘What if instead of discarding these eggs, the default should be donating them to mitochondrial donation or other forms of research,’’ Mills said, presenting the proposal to IVF specialists at the Fertility Society of Australia’s conference in Sydney last week on behalf of her bioethicist colleagues from Monash University and the University of Sydney.

The Australian parliament passed a bill in March that legalised mitochondrial donation with the aim of enabling affected women to have biological children without the increased risk of passing on mitochondrial disease.

The bill was passed by a conscience vote after staunch opposition from religious groups, and a handful of parliamentarians opposing the law change on ethical grounds.

An A$15 million (NZ$16.7 million) federal government grant is calling for applications from clinics to run a pilot and clinical trial of mitochondrial donation techniques before it can be offered to affected families.

Mitochondrial donation combines the DNA from the eggs of two different women and the genetic material of more than two people: the mother, father and egg donor.

The gene combinations created would be inherited by subsequent generations.

One mitochondrial donation technique involves removing the nucleus of a mother’s egg from the surrounding gelatinous cytoplasm that contains unhealthy mitochondria and inserting the nucleus into a donor egg with healthy mitochondria that has had its nucleus removed.

The UK was the first country to legally offer mitochondrial donation to patients in 2017.

– Nine