Baby with DNA from three people born in the UK – 05/11/2023 – Science

A baby with DNA from three people was born in the UK using a technique known as mitochondrial donation, according to the British newspaper The Guardian.

The procedure uses egg tissue from healthy people to create embryos free of genetic mutations and prevents the baby from inheriting incurable diseases such as Leigh syndrome, which causes developmental problems and death during childhood.

The technique combines mitochondrial tissue from the donor’s egg with genetic material from the biological parents’ sperm and egg. Thus, the baby that is born has genetic material from three people—only about 37 genes come from mitochondrial tissue, or 0.2% of its 20,000 genes.

The father’s sperm is used to fertilize the mother’s and donor’s eggs. The donor’s genetic material is removed and replaced by the couple’s ovum, with the parents’ DNA and the donor’s healthy mitochondria.

The technique was used successfully for the first time in 2016, in Mexico, when an American doctor announced the birth of a baby to a Jordanian woman who had suffered four miscarriages and the loss of two children —one aged six and the other with eight months.

Research on the subject in the United Kingdom was trying to help women with mitochondrial mutations, which cause incurable diseases, to have healthy children.

Mitochondria are cellular organelles, components responsible for the energy of the cells that make up our tissues. Mutations in these “power plants” can affect the brain, heart, muscles and liver, which all deteriorate as the child grows.

The British parliament allowed the procedures in 2015. Two years later, the Newcastle Fertility Center became the first and only national center authorized to perform the treatment, known by the acronym MDT (mitochondrial donation treatment, in free translation).

Each embryo application procedure must be approved by the HFEA, the British authority for health, fertilization and embryology, which has allowed 30 of them so far. The agency told The Guardian that “fewer than five” babies had been born through this procedure as of April, but did not tell the newspaper how many were born beyond the confirmed case.

The research, however, also pointed to risks, such as an abnormal number of mitochondria that are inevitably carried from the mother’s egg to the donor’s and replicate when the fetus is in the womb.