Great Britain has just launched a public consultation on a draft regulation authorizing three-parent fertility treatments for couples with mitochondrial disease. Diseases of the mitochondria (the cell’s energy generator) are inherited diseases, transmitted from the mother, which cause genetic abnormalities.
This in vitro fertilization technique, developed by an American doctor, allows the DNA of three people to be combined to create an embryo without genetic defect. It involves removing the defective mitochondria from the mother’s egg and replacing it with healthy mitochondria from another woman. After being fertilized by the father’s sperm in the laboratory, the egg is implanted in the mother and the pregnancy can then proceed normally.
For the moment, the technique of in vitro fertilization with three parents is only at the research stage in the United States and Great Britain: it is not yet complete. has been tested (successfully) only on monkeys. But the researchers would now like to conduct the experiment on humans. Hence the public consultation launched on the subject across the Channel.
“Such a breakthrough would allow Britain to be at the forefront of scientific development in the field of infertility,” said Sally Davies, Chief Medical Officer from Great Britain. “This will, in fact, allow dozens of women who forbid themselves to have a child because they are carriers of a defective gene, to know the happiness to be a mother ”.
