The world’s first child to be born using a revolutionary technique that combines the genes of three parents has been delivered in United States.
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The medical team of New York City’s New Hope Fertility Centre led by Dr John Zhang performed the milestone technique in Mexico State because there is no country where the method used to conceive the baby boy is explicitly legal but in Mexico “there are no rules,” Zhang told New Scientist.
Reports said the team performed the controversial technique that has only been legally approved in the UK so that the newborn would avoid inheriting a genetic condition from his Jordanian mother, known only as IS, that could kill him donor.
It said the parents had lost two to Leigh’s syndrome, a severe neurological disorder which attacks the nervous system, and caused by mitochondrial disease, a genetic disorder.
Tests reports said, revealed that the baby’s mother carries genes for the disease in her mitochondria, and her first child died at the age of six and the second at eight months.
The boy was born through a technique called spindle nuclear transfer in which the nucleus from one of his mother’s eggs was removed and inserted in a donor egg that had its nucleus removed.
The egg was then fertilized with sperm from the baby’s father, adding that five eggs were created but only one of it survived.
It was reported that embryologists are now focusing on the technique as a way to avoid hereditary diseases that prevent many adults with genetic mutations from having children.
