The announcement that children may be prevented from getting incurable diseases after the first baby born with DNA from three people has been greeted with caution by the Christian Medical Fellowship (CMF).
The ground-breaking IVF procedure, known as Mitochondrial Donation Treatment (MDT), uses tissue from the eggs of healthy female donors to create IVF embryos that are free from harmful mutations their mothers carry and are likely to pass on to their children.
Because the embryos combine sperm and egg from the biological parents with tiny battery-like structures called mitochondria from the donor’s egg, the resulting baby has DNA from the mother and father as usual, plus a small amount of genetic material – about 37 genes – from the donor. The process has been called ‘three-parent babies’, although more than 99.8% of the DNA in these children comes from the mother and father.
Research on MDT was pioneered in the UK by doctors at the Newcastle Fertility Centre. It aimed to help women with mutated mitochondria to have babies without the risk of passing on genetic disorders. People inherit all their mitochondria from their mother, so harmful mutations in the ‘batteries’ can affect every child a woman has. For those affected, natural conception can often be a gamble. Some babies might be born healthy because they inherit only a tiny proportion of the mutated mitochondria. But others may inherit far more and develop severe, progressive, and often fatal diseases. About one in 6,000 babies are affected by mitochondrial disorders.
Trevor Stammers of the CMF said: ‘Babies being born in the UK with genetic material from three people leaves many questions. We have no information about how many embryos were created using the technique which have either not been implanted or did not lead to a live birth. We don’t know the child’s age. Evaluating the ethics is difficult without knowing some of these answers.
‘And answers will be needed soon because MDT may raise false hopes for parents hoping this technique will enable them to have healthy children. Even when the law was first changed to permit the procedure in 2015, concerns were already being raised that it might induce the very disease it is was intended to prevent’.
James Mildred, of Christian charity CARE, said the advent of MDT was ‘a source of some concern’ and that an ‘ethical line’ had been crossed.
