UK Researchers Announce Eight Babies Born Through Three-Person IVF, but Questions Remain
"Golden mitochondria" by National Institutes of Health
(NIH) is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
Last week, researchers at the UK’s Newcastle Fertility Centre published the findings of their years-long experiment with “mitochondrial donation” techniques, also known as three-person IVF. In two papers published in the New England Journal of Medicine, they reported on eight children born from the technique. The children range in age from five months to over two years old. One pregnancy is ongoing. While news of an unspecified number of births from the Newcastle program was reported in The Guardian in 2023, no information was publicly known about the children prior to publication.
The eight children (including identical twins), born to seven mothers with mtDNA-related disease, are all reported to have been born healthy. Five of the children have undetectable levels of their mother’s mitochondrial DNA, leading researchers to conclude that the technique successfully protects against inherited mitochondrial disease. Three children have low levels of their mothers’ mitochondrial DNA, ranging from 5% to 20%, that currently fall below the threshold for mtDNA-related disease.
Media coverage of the research has been mixed.
In an editorial, The Guardian called it a “cautious genetic triumph.” Progress Educational Trust, a UK-based charity that promotes fertility treatments, went further, trumpeting “a triumph of scientific innovation.”
NPR reported that “the results are being hailed as a milestone in the quest to harness cutting-edge genetic technologies to enable more women to have healthy babies.” Reporter Rob Stein also highlighted that “worries about risks temper hopes” for the technique. His sources cite its significant scientific, ethical, and societal risks.
"It's dangerous," says Stuart Newman, a professor of cell biology and anatomy at the New York Medical College. "It's biologically dangerous. And then it's dangerous culturally because it's the beginning of biological manipulation that won't just end with preventing certain diseases, but will blossom into a full-fledged eugenics program where genes will be manipulated to make designer babies."
"I think it will normalize the fact that it's appropriate to take this material and to tinker with it, all in the pursuit of the perfect baby, whatever somebody happens to think that is," says Francois [sic] Baylis, a distinguished research professor emerita at Dalhousie University in Canada.
MIT Tech Review's Jess Hamzelou provided additional context, recounting a series of previous announcements of births through three-person IVF. These include “cytoplasmic injection” in the 1990s; John Zhang’s misadventure in Mexico; and various uncontrolled experiments ongoing in Ukraine, Greece, and elsewhere. Numerous clinics, operating in these countries without oversight or regulation, have offered three-person IVF in the years since the Newcastle study began. Some of these unregulated experiments have purported to prevent transmission of mtDNA disease; others are aimed (without convincing evidence) at general infertility.
Hamzelou also highlights recent reports of mitochondrial reversion or reversal, where traces of the mother’s mtDNA increase over time, sometimes overtaking the donor mtDNA. This could potentially lead to mtDNA-related disease, exactly what three-person IVF is purported to prevent.
Hamzelou concludes:
I don’t want to pour cold water over the new UK results. It was great to finally see the results of a trial that’s been running for eight years. And the births of healthy babies are something to celebrate. But it’s not a simple success story. Mitochondrial donation doesn’t guarantee a healthy baby. We still have more to learn, not only from these babies, but from the others that have already been born.
CGS has covered three-person IVF extensively over the past decade, highlighting the risks to children and women, the rapid rise in an international market offering this technique outside regulation or oversight, and the potential for it to serve as a wedge to introducing heritable genome editing. The following Biopolitical Times articles provide a sampling of our writing on the subject.
- First UK Babies Born after “Three-Person IVF”: Why all the secrecy?
- On Safety in Engineering Embryos: Engage the Brakes
- Australia’s Parliament Should Maintain the Laws that Prohibit "Mitochondrial Donation" By Katherine Drabiak, Guest Contributor | 03.11.2021
- The Scandal-Plagued Company behind Stranded Surrogacy Babies is Also Promoting a Controversial IVF Technique By Katie Hasson | 06.05.2020
- Three-Person IVF: From Genetic Disease to Genetic Design? By Ayesha Chatterjee, Guest Contributor | 03.26.2019
- 3-person IVF and Infertility: What Kind of Slippery Slope is This? By Leah Lowthorp | 10.26.2016
- UK Researchers Now Say Three-Person Embryo Technique Doesn't Work; Propose New Method By Jessica Cussins | 06.08.2016
- A Paragraph in Slow Motion: Three-Person IVF in The New York Times By George Estreich, Guest Contributor | 07.10.2014
- Selling the Next False Hope? How Experimental IVF Techniques Could be Legalized Despite Increasing Evidence of Potential Harm By Jessica Cussins | 06.24.2014