Myth Replacement Therapy: MPs Debate the Science of Mitochondria
By Dr. Ted Morrow,
BioNews
| 09. 08. 2014
The regulatory path to clinical trials of mitochondrial replacement therapy (MRT) was recently debated in the House of Commons. MRT is under development in the UK as way of potentially eliminating mitochondrial disease. The techniques essentially swap diseased mitochondria in the unfertilised or fertilised eggs of affected women for putatively healthy ones obtained from a donor. The outcome is unknown and evidence from animals suggest mismatching may occur between the nuclear DNA from the mother and the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) derived from the donor (1). The debate was called by a group of backbenchers that are unhappy about the pace with which the Government is apparently moving towards changing the regulations. The split in views in the chamber was fairly even.
Read more...
Related Articles
By Megan Molteni and Anil Oza, STAT | 10.07.2025
For two years, a panel of scientific experts, clinicians, and patient advocates had been hammering out ways to increase community engagement in National Institutes of Health-funded science. When they presented their road map to the NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya last...
Paula Amato & Shoukhrat Mitalipov
[OHSU News/Christine Torres Hicks]
On September 30th, a team of 21 scientists from Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) published a significant paper in Nature Communications, with a scientifically accurate but, to many, somewhat abstruse headline:
Induction of experimental cell division to generate cells with reduced chromosome ploidy
The lead authors were Shoukhrat Mitalipov, recently described here as “a push-the-envelope biologist,” and his long-term colleague Paula Amato. (Recall that in July the pair had co-published with...
By Pam Belluck, The New York Times | 10.17.2025
Before dawn on a March morning, Doug Whitney walked into a medical center 2,000 miles from home, about to transform from a mild-mannered, bespectacled retiree into a superhuman research subject.
First, a doctor inserted a needle into his back to...
By Julia Black, MIT Technology Review | 10.16.2025
Consider, if you will, the translucent blob in the eye of a microscope: a human blastocyst, the biological specimen that emerges just five days or so after a fateful encounter between egg and sperm. This bundle of cells, about the size of...
