3-parent babies to be reality soon, say scientists

Reuters/London

A British expert scientific panel gave its backing yesterday to potential new three-way fertility treatments that would for the first time allow genetically modified embryos to be implanted into women.

The “three-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.

Known as mitochondrial replacement or transfer, the methods are at the research stage in laboratories in Britain and the US and have never 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 (FDA) has also convened an expert committee to decide whether safety concerns raised by three-parent IVF are minimal enough to allow clinical trials in humans to begin.

Mitochondrial replacement involves intervening in the fertilisation 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 energy-generating batteries inside cells, and around one in 6,000 babies around the world are born with serious mitochondrial disorders.

The potential treatment is also known as three-parent in-vitro fertilisation (IVF), because the offspring would have genes from a mother, a father and from a female donor.