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Troubling new findings have been discovered that could affect the lives of (misleadingly* branded) "three-parent" offspring born thanks to breakthrough mitochondrial replacement therapy.
The technique grabbed the world's attention when in September a baby was born bearing the DNA of three parents, a feat that overcame the otherwise fatal Leigh syndrome** genetic disorder carried by the child's mother.
It was heralded as a major step up from in vitro fertilisation. in the technique, the nucleus of an egg from the syndrome-affected mother is implanted into a female donor egg with healthy mitochondria which has had its nucleus removed. The resulting egg is fertilised with the father's sperm.
It has since been approved by the UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority with the first treatments possible in 2018.
Now a paper (pdf) published in the journal Nature – and written by 30 researchers headed by Oregon Health and Science University Dr Shoukhrat Mitalipov – has found mitochondrial replacement therapy in 15 per cent of cases may allow the fatal defects it amends to resurface, even introducing new defects.
[Ed. Note: The asterisk in the first line refers to a footnote in the source article; it is not a typo.]
(Score: 3, Informative) by sjames on Saturday January 07 2017, @06:54PM
You should really re-read TFA. They described the procedure in the 3rd paragraph. The asterisk was just a detail for people who missed that point. Also, it described a way that the eradicated genetic disorder may show up in descendants of the child (if female) resulting from the procedure as well as even possibly showing up later in the child's life even when the problem was in the mtDNA and the treatment appeared succcessful. There is also speculation that the created mis-match between nuclear and mt DNA could create new conditions.
TFA did a decent job of covering it.