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Paula Boddington’s Posts

Three person IVF

It was announced yesterday that the government is moving towards allowing so-called three person IVF for the creation of embryos free of mitochondrial disease.

The mitochondria are tiny organelles in the body of the cell, concerned with important energy functions, and which contain a small amount of DNA. They are present in the egg, but not in the sperm, and are passed down the female line, more or less unchanged, from mothers to all her offspring, and then from daughters to grandchildren and so on. In some cases, women can suffer from various mitochondrial disorders, which they are at risk of then passing on to their children. These disorders may be relatively mild, but in perhaps 5 – 10 cases a year in the UK, babies will be born with very serious disease.

There are a couple of ways of doing the new procedures, but basically the new proposed techniques take the egg of an affected woman and remove the nuclear DNA (the vast majority of our DNA which goes to shape our basic features). A donated egg is also taken, its nuclear DNA removed, leaving behind the healthy mitochondrial DNA. The nuclear DNA of the affected woman is then transplanted into the body of the healthy egg, resulting in an egg which has the DNA of the affected woman, minus the tiny fraction of mitochondrial DNA concerned with cell energy functions.

The Department of Health has backed this procedure after the HFEA conducted public consultations earlier this year; the HFEA reported broad public support for the techniques.  The Chief Medical Officer is now urging the drafting of regulations to allow the procedure to be approved by Parliament as soon as possible. There are hopes that the first patients could be treated as soon as 2014.

Mitochondrial disease can be really severe and lead to great suffering and early death. So why would there be any doubts about the use of such techniques?

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