Scientists reveal using IVF to reduce risk of genetic diseases in babies

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Scientists have revealed eight healthy babies have been born in the UK using part of a third parent's DNA to reduce their risk of developing mitochondrial genetic diseases. The disease which can lead to children dying at an early age or developing deafness and blindness has no treatment.

Transcript

00:00It is a risk reduction strategy. It's very early days. This has been one study and eight babies

00:08have been born and that is a remarkable step forward for the whole field, most importantly

00:13for all of the families out there who have mitochondrial genetic disease. The technique

00:19itself, it's a fairly complex procedure that takes place in an IVF lab where you have a donor

00:26egg with really healthy mitochondria from someone who's donated their eggs and that's a really

00:31important part of this step. Then you have an egg from the mum who has mitochondrial genetic

00:37disease. Take the nuclear DNA from the egg with affected mitochondria and transfer that

00:43nuclear DNA, the DNA that makes us who we are, into the egg with the healthy mitochondria.

00:49So that's how you do it in a lab and members of the team in the UK have been fantastic in

00:54pioneering this technique and moving it from what was a research environment into a clinical

01:01environment and they've really, what they've done in this study has been really remarkable

01:06for the future of genetic disease. There's a really active community that we're waiting

01:12for this in Australia and we're doing our best to get it introduced for them as quickly as

01:17possible so there's quite a few in the, you're waiting for something to be available for them.

Category

Transcript

Recommended