New Delhi, July 17 || 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.
The babies were born to seven women at high risk of transmitting serious disease caused by mutations in mitochondrial DNA, said the researchers from Newcastle University in the UK.
“All babies were healthy at birth, meeting their developmental milestones, and the mother’s disease-causing mitochondrial DNA mutations were either undetectable or present at levels that are very unlikely to cause disease,” the researchers said.
The pioneering study, published in two papers in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), 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. Our ongoing research seeks to bridge the gap between risk reduction and prevention of mitochondrial DNA disease by addressing this problem,” said lead author Professor Mary Herbert, professor of reproductive biology at Newcastle.