“Eight babies have been born in the UK using DNA from three people to prevent a deadly inherited disease. The technique replaces faulty mitochondria from the mother’s egg with healthy ones from a donor, while keeping the parents’ nuclear DNA intact,” reports The Doomslayer.
The BBC reports:
Eight babies have been born in the UK using genetic material from three people to prevent devastating and often fatal conditions.
The method, pioneered by UK scientists, combines the egg and sperm from a mum and dad with a second egg from a donor woman.
The technique has been legal here for a decade but we now have the first proof it is leading to children born free of incurable mitochondrial disease. These conditions are normally passed from mother to child, starving the body of energy. This can cause severe disability and some babies die within days of being born….Children born through the three-person technique inherit most of their DNA, their genetic blueprint, from their parents, but also get a tiny amount, about 0.1%, from the second woman. This is a change that is passed down the generations….
Mitochondria are tiny structures inside nearly every one of our cells. They are the reason we breathe as they use oxygen to convert food into the form of energy our bodies use as fuel.
Defective mitochondria can leave the body with insufficient energy to keep the heart beating as well as causing brain damage, seizures, blindness, muscle weakness and organ failure.
About one in 5,000 babies are born with mitochondrial disease….Some parents have faced the agony of having multiple children die from these diseases. Mitochondria are passed down only from mother to child.
Another doctor is working on mitochondria transplants to save lives.
In 2023, a woman who was previously unable to have children received her sister’s womb in the first womb transplant in the United Kingdom.
