Experts back ‘3-parent’ IVF to avoid incurable diseases
Print Edition
A BRITISH expert scientific panel has given its backing to potential new 3-way fertility treatments that would for the first time allow genetically modified embryos to be implanted into women.
The “3-parent” IVF techniques are designed to help families with particular genetic faults who want to avoid passing on incurable diseases to their children. They could be available for patients in two years, the scientists told reporters at a briefing in London yesterday.
Known as mitochondrial replacement or transfer, the methods are at the research stage in laboratories in Britain and the United States and have not yet been carried out in people anywhere in the world.
They are illegal in Britain for now, but the government said last year it was drawing up draft legislation which if passed into law would allow the treatments to go ahead if they proved safe and effective in clinical trials.
In the US, the Food and Drug Administration has also convened an expert committee to decide whether safety concerns raised by 3-parent IVF are small enough to allow clinical trials in humans to begin.
Mitochondrial replacement involves intervening in the fertilization process to remove faulty mitochondrial DNA, which can cause inherited conditions such as fatal heart problems, liver failure, brain disorders, blindness and muscular dystrophy.
Mitochondria act as tiny batteries inside cells, and around 1 in 6,000 babies around the world are born with serious mitochondrial disorders.
The potential treatment is known as 3-parent in vitro fertilization, because the offspring would have genes from a mother, a father and from a female donor.
In its report, the British expert panel said the evidence it had seen so far “does not suggest that these techniques are unsafe” and does suggest they could be “potentially useful for a specific and defined group of patients.”
Peter Braude, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at King’s College London and a member of the panel, said: “In the absence of any effective treatment, mitochondrial replacement therapies offer great hope to families affected by mitochondrial disorders.”
Although some critics of mitochondrial transfer say it is akin to creating designer babies, replacing faulty mitochondria with healthy ones would not be genetic engineering in the usual understanding of the term. It would not make a child smarter, sportier, more attractive, or otherwise different from what his or her genome and environment would produce in the normal way.
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