A donor egg will save you from infertility
A new type of "child from three parents" will soon be born in Greece
Spanish geneticists performed the world's first operation to conceive another version of a "child from three parents", which allowed a infertile 32-year-old resident of Greece to become a future mother. The first results of the controversial procedure are told by the University of Barcelona (Embryotools achieves the world's first pregnancy with a new nuclear transfer technique for treating infertility).
"Despite the fact that we use gametes from one man and two women, the nuclear DNA of the unborn child, on which all its traits depend, is inherited only from the biological mother, as in normal fertilization. From the egg of the second woman, only her mitochondrial DNA remains, containing 37 genes, or one percent of the genome," said Nuno Costa-Borges, scientific director of Embryotools.
Three years ago, the world was shocked by sensational news: a child was born in a Mexican clinic, conceived not by two, but by three parents – two mothers and one father. Later, a similar procedure was performed in one of the clinics in Ukraine, where there are no prohibitions on such genetic experiments.
This procedure, developed by the team of Soviet-American geneticist Shukrat Mitalipov during experiments on monkeys in 2009, in fact resembles cloning. Scientists extract the nucleus of a fertilized egg and transfer it to a donor egg, the nucleus of which is previously removed.
This allows you to get rid of defective mitochondria (cellular power plants), which replace the corresponding parts of the cell of the second mother. Thus, the baby will be protected from a number of severe genetic diseases, such as Lee syndrome, with the development of which the patient gradually loses control of the body and dies of suffocation.
According to Costa-Borges, the procedure can be tested in practice only if the egg and sperm, from which the child inherits genetic material, are able to merge and begin to divide normally at least at the first stages of embryo development.
Recently, Spanish scientists experimented on mice, helping British geneticists prepare for the first legal procedure of this kind in Europe. They accidentally found out that in this way it is possible to fight various forms of female infertility, when the egg can still merge with the sperm, but loses the ability to normal division.
This idea seemed very promising to them, but a problem immediately arose – such clinical experiments are prohibited in Spain and most other EU countries. But two years ago, geneticists found a way out of the situation, enlisting the support of the Greek government and a 30-year-old infertile woman who agreed to participate in the experiments.
Now she is in the last trimester of pregnancy, and in the near future, as the geneticists hope, she will have a healthy boy. The same procedures have been started for eight other women: scientists have already collected embryos, but have not yet implanted them into the womb of future mothers.
As the Barcelona geneticists emphasize, this procedure is unlikely to be widely used in medical practice, since it requires very qualified specialists and special laboratory conditions. Nevertheless, the successful birth of the first child will open the way for a new way to combat infertility.
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