"Not unsafe." Those are the carefully chosen words that the latest panel convened by the UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) used to describe a novel technique that would create babies using genetic material from three people.
The panel's scientific report, released yesterday, means that the technique is now closer than ever to becoming a reality in the UK.
The idea is to allow women with faulty mitochondrial DNA to have a genetically related child without the fear of passing on DNA that could cause devastating, incurable diseases. Mitochondrial DNA is passed from mother to child in the egg. The technique has not yet been approved in the US or the UK – but is undergoing intense scrutiny in both countries.
Work done so far suggests that the technique – a modified form of IVF – is safe enough to try in clinical trials, the HFEA panel said, as long as several extra experiments are carried out first and children born as a result of the technique are followed up for an extensive period.
The UK government could vote to legalise the procedure this year and the extra assessments could be done in the next 18 months to two years, the panel estimate.
Three become one
The procedure uses a donor egg with normal mitochondrial DNA and a nucleus taken from the prospective mother's egg, either before or after it is fertilised by her partner. The panel expects between 100 and 200 families to come forward for treatment every year in the UK.
Currently, families concerned about passing on faulty mitochondria can undergo pre-implantation genetic diagnosis but this doesn't help women who have problems with all or most of their mitochondrial DNA.
The debate over the safety of mitochondrial replacement mirrors that over IVF. "Are these technologies safe and efficacious in humans?" said Andy Greenfield, panel chair and programme leader at the Medical Research Council's research unit in Harwell. "We won't know for sure until we do it in humans. All these questions were asked in the 1970s when IVF was a new technique. They were only answered when the first IVF child came along."
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