Doctors in the UK have announced the birth of eight healthy babies after performing a groundbreaking IVF procedure that uses DNA from three people to prevent children from inheriting incurable genetic disorders. The babies were born to seven women who were all at high risk of passing on life-threatening mitochondrial diseases.
The technique, known as mitochondrial donation treatment (MDT), involves transferring the genetic material from a mother's fertilised egg into a healthy donor egg from which the nucleus has been removed. This creates an embryo with chromosomes from both parents but healthy mitochondria from the donor. The UK changed the law to allow the procedure in 2015, and the first licence was granted to a fertility clinic at Newcastle University in 2017.
The four boys and four girls, including one set of identical twins, have no signs of the mitochondrial diseases they were at risk of inheriting. One further pregnancy is ongoing. All children were healthy at birth, though a small number experienced minor health issues that resolved with treatment. Genetic tests showed they had no or low levels of mutant mitochondria, considered too low to cause disease.
Professor Doug Turnbull, who helped develop the procedure over more than two decades, said the healthy births were reassuring for researchers and families. Professor Mary Herbert described the outcome as 'rewarding for all of us'. The mother of one of the girls said: 'As parents, all we ever wanted was to give our child a healthy start in life. After years of uncertainty this treatment gave us hope – and then it gave us our baby... we're overwhelmed with gratitude. Science gave us a chance.'
The births are described in two papers in the New England Journal of Medicine. Five of the children are less than a year old, two are aged between one and two, and one is older. Bobby McFarland, director of the NHS Highly Specialised Service for Rare Mitochondrial Disorders, confirmed that all children are meeting developmental milestones.
