First Ever 'Three-Parent Baby' Is Delivered by US Medical Team in Mexico Jessica Hamzelou - New Scientist
go to original September 28, 2016

World’s first baby born with new “3 parent” technique (New Scientist)

It’s a boy! A five-month-old boy is the first baby to be born using a new technique that incorporates DNA from three parents, New Scientist reveals. “This is great news and a huge deal,” says Dusko Ilic at King’s College London, who wasn’t involved in the work. “It’s revolutionary.”

The controversial technique, which allows parents with rare genetic mutations to have healthy babies, has only been legally approved in the UK. But the birth of the child, whose Jordanian parents were treated by a US-based team in Mexico, should fast-forward progress around the world, say embryologists.

The boy’s mother carries genes for Leigh syndrome, a fatal disorder that affects the developing nervous system. Genes for the disease reside in DNA in the mitochondria, which provide energy for our cells and carry just 37 genes that are passed down to us from our mothers. This is separate from the majority of our DNA, which is housed in each cell’s nucleus.

Around a quarter of her mitochondria have the disease-causing mutation. While she is healthy, Leigh syndrome was responsible for the deaths of her first two children. The couple sought out the help of John Zhang and his team at the New Hope Fertility Center in New York City.

Zhang has been working on a way to avoid mitochondrial disease using a so-called “three-parent” technique. In theory, there are a few ways of doing this. The method approved in the UK is called pronuclear transfer and involves fertilizing both the mother’s egg and a donor egg with the father’s sperm. Before the fertilized eggs start dividing into early-stage embryos, each nucleus is removed. The nucleus from the donor’s fertilized egg is discarded and replaced by that from the mother’s fertilized egg.

But this technique wasn’t appropriate for the couple – as Muslims, they were opposed to the destruction of two embryos. So Zhang took a different approach, called spindle nuclear transfer. He removed the nucleus from one of the mother’s eggs and inserted it into a donor egg that had had its own nucleus removed. The resulting egg – with nuclear DNA from the mother and mitochondrial DNA from a donor – was then fertilized with the father’s sperm.

Zhang’s team used this approach to create five embryos, only one of which developed normally. This embryo was implanted in the mother and the child was born nine months later. “It’s exciting news,” says Bert Smeets at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. The team will describe the findings at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine’s Scientific Congress in Salt Lake City in October.

Neither method has been approved in the US, so Zhang went to Mexico instead, where he says “there are no rules”. He is adamant that he made the right choice. “To save lives is the ethical thing to do,” he says.

Read the rest at New Scientist

Related: Who's the Daddy: Does It Really Matter Where Your DNA Comes From? (Deutsche Welle)

Related: Everything You Wanted to Know About ‘3-Parent’ Babies (New Scientist)

Related: Why That Story About a Baby Born to Three Parents Might Be Giving You Déjà Vu (VICE)

Related: Controversy Erupts Around Baby with Three Biological Parents (Forbes)

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