The first child produced using DNA from three different people has been generated, a ground-breaking scientific first for the UK, according to the BBC. 99.8% of the DNA used in this operation is from the two parents, while the remaining 1.2% is from a female donor. The ground-breaking method aims to stop children from being born with fatal mitochondrial disorders.
By using tissue from the eggs of healthy female donors, a procedure known as mitochondrial donation therapy (MDT) is used to produce IVF embryos that are free of dangerous abnormalities that their mothers contain and are likely to pass on to their offspring.
The baby will inherit the mother’s and father’s nuclear DNA
Notably, mitochondrial disorders are lethal within days or even hours of birth and are incurable. Mitochondrial donation therapy is a modified kind of in vitro fertilization (IVF) that uses mitochondria from a healthy donor egg because they can only be handed down by the mother.
The infant will inherit the mother’s and father’s nuclear DNA, which will determine important traits like personality and eye color. It will also contain a little percentage of female donor-provided mitochondrial DNA.
The breakthrough baby was delivered at a clinic in Newcastle, northeast England, but the birth’s MDT program details have not been made public by the clinic’s doctors.
The UK is not the first nation to produce children through MDT
Dagan Wells, a professor of reproductive genetics at the University of Oxford who took part in the UK breakthrough told The Guardian that the clinical experience with MRT was ”encouraging” but the number of reported cases was ”far too small” to draw any definitive conclusions about the ”safety or efficacy”.
The UK is not the first nation to produce children through MDT. In 2016, a Jordanian family receiving therapy in the US gave birth to the first child delivered using this method.
