Doctors in New York have announced the first birth of a child conceived via a controversial fertility procedure involving genetic material from three different people.
The procedure to conceive the so-called “three-parent baby” was performed by American and British doctors in Mexico. The treatment has been approved for use in the United Kingdom, but not in the United States.
The decision to undertake the procedure was sparked by the revelation that the child’s mother was carrying the genetic recipe for Leigh syndrome, an incurable disease in which brain cells slowly die off. In the treatment, doctors used DNA from another woman to avoid passing on the disease.
Credit: Marcy Darnovsky
“She had four pregnancy losses and two deceased children at age 8 months and 6 years from Leigh syndrome,” doctors who performed the procedure wrote in a report published by the American Society of Reproductive Medicine.
One medical ethics group cited the decision to do the procedure Mexico as evidence the procedure has yet to be fully vetted.
“This fertility doctor openly acknowledged that he went to Mexico where `there are no rules’ in order to evade ongoing review processes and existing regulations in the United States,” Marcy Darnovsky, executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society, said in a news release. “No researcher or doctor has the right to flout agreed-upon rules and make up their own. This is an irresponsible and unethical act, and sets a dangerous precedent.”
The genes for Leigh syndrome reside in cell organelles known as mitochondria, so the controversial procedure involved extracting the DNA from an ovum of the mother and putting it inside an egg with good mitochondria from a healthy donor, after first taking out the donor egg’s nuclear DNA. Then that egg, with its good mitochondria and the mother’s DNA was then fertilized with sperm from the father, resulting in a “three-person embryo.”
The team produced four embryos using this method and one was deemed good enough to be implanted into the 36-year-old mother. It developed normally and a baby boy was born after 37 weeks of pregnancy.
“The baby is currently 3 months old and doing well,” the doctors wrote in their report.
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Image credit: New Hope Fertility Clinic
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