In a remarkable breakthrough, scientists in the UK used a three-person in vitro fertilization (IVF) technique to bring to life eight children and spared them from genetic mitochondrial disease. The infants-four girls and four boys, including one set of identical twins-were born using DNA from three people. Researchers from Newcastle University in the UK said, the babies were born to seven women at high risk of transmitting serious disease caused by mutations in mitochondrial DNA. They said, all babies were healthy at birth, meeting their developmental milestones. Researchers said, the mother’s disease-causing mitochondrial DNA mutations were either undetectable or present at levels that are very unlikely to cause disease.
The pioneering study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, describes the technique where the nucleus from the mother’s fertilised egg, along with the nucleus of the father’s sperm, is transferred into a healthy egg provided by an anonymous donor. Mitochondrial donation technologies are currently regarded as risk-reduction treatments owing to the carryover of maternal mitochondrial DNA during the mitochondrial donation procedure.
