UK becomes first country to license three-parent IVF treatment
The UK has become the first country to formally license a new type of in-vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment designed to create babies from three people when the country’s Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority (HFEA) gave the final go-ahead.
HFEA, the UK’s independent regulator that oversees the use of gametes and embryos in fertility treatment and research, gave the license for the treatment known as mitochondrial transfer, which doctors say could help prevent incurable inherited diseases.
Last year, the country’s parliament voted to change the law to allow the treatments if and when they were ready for licensing. This latest HFEA decision means the first babies created by the technique in the UK could be born in 2017.
Mark Walport, the government’s chief scientific adviser, praised the decision as a “careful and considered” assessment which put the UK at the forefront of medical advances.
The technique involves intervention in the fertilization process through the removal of the mitochondria, which act as tiny energy-generating batteries inside cells, and which, if faulty, can cause fatal heart problems, liver failure, brain disorders, blindness and muscular dystrophy.
“Mitochondrial donation offers a real opportunity to cure a class of potentially devastating inherited conditions and will bring hope to hundreds of affected families in the UK,” said Dagan Wells, a professor at Oxford University’s biomedical research center and one of many experts welcoming the decision.
The treatment is known as “three-parent” IVF because the babies, born from genetically modified embryos, would have DNA from a mother, a father and from a female donor.
Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust global health charity, said it was a “landmark day for people living with mitochondrial disease”.
Research teams around the world have tested and trialed the techniques in a series of pre-clinical experiments, but as yet they have not been used to treat patients in the UK.
The world’s first and, so far, only known mitochondrial transfer baby was born earlier this year after US doctors working at a clinic in Mexico helped a Jordanian couple conceive using the new three-way treatment.
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