As mothers are given go-ahead, could UK’s first three-parent babies be born this year?

BRITAIN’S first three-parent babies are set to be born to women with incurable genetic diseases who have been given the go-ahead for IVF.

Two women have received approval to each have a baby using the DNA of a separate healthy female donor. It means their children will both technically have two mothers, in the biggest leap forward for fertility treatment since IVF was invented.

It is not known when IVF will begin in the two women, but if treatment were to start straight away, the first three-parent babies in the UK could be born by Christmas.

Newcastle University was given the green light to carry out IVF using the DNA of two women last March. The technique is controversial because of fears it could pave the way for ‘designer babies’, but is a lifeline for up to 3,000 women in danger of passing on deadly diseases such as muscular dystrophy. Now the first candidates have been given permission to go ahead.

The women have not been named but minutes from a Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) meeting reveal they carry mutations in a gene which cause Merff syndrome. The neurological condition, which affects only one in 100,000 people, can cause seizures and muscle weakness, often leading to early death.

The HFEA, which made the decision, stated that in the case of each woman: ‘The committee considered the patient’s family history and the manifestation of the disease, along with her medical history, which shows that it is likely that any child conceived by her may be affected with this serious multi-systemic and progressive disease which severely impacts on affected individuals’ quality of life, often resulting in high morbidity and early death.’

Critics fear the DNA donation could become a ‘slippery slope’ eventually used by couples to change characteristics such as personality and eye colour in children.

Its use in infertile couples is banned, with the method allowed only for women with genetic diseases at risk of passing them on to their children.

The first three-parent baby was born in Mexico in 2016. Controversially, a second three-parent baby was born in the Ukraine early last year to a 34-year-old woman who could not get pregnant, but was claimed to have reversed her infertility using genetic material from a second woman.

Last year it was reported there were three British women lined up to have three-parent babies. It is possible the country’s first three-parent baby could be born to two mothers who know each other, with eligible women understood to have asked friends to be egg donors.

But while the baby will technically have two mothers, the second will contribute only 0.1 per cent of her DNA.

Dr Simon Fishel, president of CARE Fertility, said: ‘This clearly is a big step, and hopefully it will prove to be a positively momentous technology to help families, but there will inevitably remain many medical science questions to be answered. They can only be answered by using the technology.

‘It is brilliant it is under regulation, which quells any general criticisms seen elsewhere in the world in an unregulated environment.’

‘Many questions to be answered’