Boy with three parents opens new era in IVF
American doctors have created the first baby born through a controversial ‘‘three-parent’’ IVF method.
The boy, who has genes from two different women, was conceived in a Mexican clinic last year, a few months after Britain became the only country explicitly to legalise the technique.
Experts said the birth marked a new era in fertility medicine, but many warned they were concerned the experiment had been shrouded in secrecy and carried out far from the eyes of regulators.
The procedure, known as mitochondrial transfer, involves using a very small amount of DNA from a donor to prevent the mother from passing on a range of lethal or debilitating genetic diseases to her children.
Critics argue the method is fraught with ethical problems and its safety is unproven, while advocates say it is the most promising way to treat otherwise incurable conditions that affect about one in 4000 people.
The Jordanian mother of the baby, who is in her 30s, approached doctors at the New Hope Fertility Centre in New York after discovering she carried the genetic code for a life-threatening disease in her mitochondria, microscopic structures inside every human cell. She and her husband had already lost two young children to the disease.
A team of clinicians took the nuclei – bundles of DNA containing all the information that makes up a person’s genetic identity – out of the woman’s eggs and used them to replace the nuclei in eggs harvested from another woman.
These mixed eggs were then activated with a pulse of electricity and fertilised with the father’s sperm to make five embryos, one of which developed well enough to be moved into the mother’s womb.
The baby is now five months old and said to be healthy. His nuclear DNA – which account for more than 99.8 per cent of his genes – comes entirely from his mother and father.
John Zhang, one of the doctors who carried out the experiment, said it had been performed at a branch of New Hope in Mexico because ‘‘there were no rules’’ restricting fertility research in the country. ‘‘To save lives is the ethical thing to do,’’ he said.
A British study suggests the method is as safe as normal IVF and leads to embryos with very low levels of malfunctioning DNA.
Dusko Ilic, reader in stem cell science at King’s College London, said the achievement was groundbreaking.
However, he also warned that unscrupulous clinics in countries with poor regulation might exploit couples desperate to try the method for themselves.
‘‘It appears to be a good end result,’’ he said. ‘‘But it risks encouraging others to follow the example, as we saw with stem cell tourism. That could be dangerous as understandably impatient people pursue treatment in the very places where regulation is least strict.’’
Another researcher, speaking on condition of anonymity, said: ‘‘There’s a degree of reprehensibility about it because people have gone to an unregulated society to do it when there are concerns about doing it at all.’’