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Baby on Board
After four cycles of in vitro fertilization, a Greek woman and her partner were still unable to conceive. But now the 32 year old woman is pregnant and her baby is born with the DNA of three people.
While other couples have resorted to the same procedure, called mitochondrial replacement therapy, to prevent their offspring from inheriting genetic diseases, this is the first time researchers have done so. use in a clinical trial to treat infertility – thus opening up new hopes for the globe is struggling to conceive.
A pinch of DNA
In maternal spindle transfer, a type of mitochondrial replacement therapy, doctors place the core of a woman's egg in a donor egg whose core has been removed. They then fertilize the egg with sperm and implant it in the woman.
This allows a couple to prevent their baby from inheriting health problems related to the woman's mitochondria, which exist inside the egg but out of the nucleus.
Since the nucleus contains 99.8% of a person's genes, the baby will inherit most of his mother's DNA as well as that of his father – but he will also have the donor's DNA. where the term "baby of three parents".
In 2016, a Jordanian woman gave birth to the first baby conceived by mitochondrial replacement therapy. However, she underwent the procedure to prevent her child from inheriting Leigh's syndrome, a genetic abnormality that would have been fatal for the baby.
The following year, Ukrainian doctors claimed to have helped a sterile couple conceive through the same treatment. However, this pregnancy was not part of a formal clinical trial, unlike the current one, which was undertaken by a team of Embryotools from Spain and the Institute of Life of Greece.
New hope
The pregnancy of the Greek woman might indicate that mitochondrial replacement therapy is a viable option for infertile couples – but we still have a long way to go before becoming a common treatment for infertility, according to Gloria Calderón, director of Embryotools .
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