First 'three person baby' born using new method

The world's first baby has been born using a new "three person" fertility technique, New Scientist reveals.

The five-month-old boy has the usual DNA from his mum and dad, plus a tiny bit of genetic code from a donor.

US doctors took the unprecedented step to ensure the baby boy would be free of a genetic condition that his Jordanian mother carries in her genes.

Experts say the move heralds a new era in medicine and could help other families with rare genetic conditions.

But they warn that rigorous checks of this new and controversial technology, called mitochondrial donation, are needed.

It's not the first time scientists have created babies that have DNA from three people - that breakthrough began in the late 1990s - but it is an entirely new and significant method.

Three person babies

Mitochondria are tiny structures inside nearly every cell of the body that convert food into usable energy.

Some women carry genetic defects in mitochondria and they can pass these on to their children.

In the case of the Jordanian family, it was a disorder called Leigh Syndrome that would have proved fatal to any baby conceived. The family had already experienced the heartache of four miscarriages as well as the death of two children - one at eight months and the other at six years of age.

Leigh syndrome

§  A severe neurological disorder, affecting at least one in 40,000 new-born babies.

§  Usually becomes apparent during the first year of a child's life.

§  First signs include vomiting, diarrhoea and difficulty with swallowing.

§  Causes the progressive loss of movement, and deterioration of mental functions.

§  Symptoms are linked to the development of patches of damaged tissue which develop in the brain.

§  Children with the condition usually die within two to three years, usually because of respiratory failure.

§  Mutations in 75 different genes have been linked to the condition.

§  Most of those mutations occur in DNA from the nucleus, but in about one in five cases the culprit is found in mitochondrial DNA.

Scientists have devised a number of fertility methods to help such families.

The US team, who travelled to Mexico to carry out the procedure because there are no laws there that prohibit it, used a method that takes all the vital DNA from the mother's egg plus healthy mitochondria from a donor egg to create a healthy new egg that can be fertilised with the father's sperm.

The result is a baby with 0.1% of their DNA from the donor (mitochondrial DNA) and all the genetic code for things like hair and eye colour from the mother and father.

Dr John Zhang, medical director at the New Hope Fertility Centre in New York City, and his colleagues used the method to make five embryos - only one of them developed normally.

The UK has already passed laws to allow the creation of babies from three people.

But the science does raise ethical questions, including how any child from the technique might feel about having DNA from three people.

Fertility experts say it is important to push ahead, but cautiously.

Some have questioned whether we are only now hearing the success story while failed attempts could have gone unreported.

Prof Alison Murdoch, part of the team at Newcastle University that has been at the forefront of three person IVF work in the UK, said: "The translation of mitochondrial donation to a clinical procedure is not a race but a goal to be achieved with caution to ensure both safety and reproducibility."

Critics say the work is irresponsible.

Dr David King from the pro-choice group Human Genetics Alert, said: "It is outrageous that they simply ignored the cautious approach of US regulators and went to Mexico, because they think they know better. Since when is a simplistic "to save lives is the ethical thing to do" a balanced medical ethics approach, especially when no lives were being saved?"

Dr Zhang and his team say they will answer these questions when they presents their findings at a meeting of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine in October.

Prof Darren Griffin, an expert in Genetics at the University of Kent, said: "This study heralds a new era in preimplantation genetics and represents a novel means for the treatment of families at risk of transmitting genetic disease.

"With radical new treatments like this there are always challenging ethical issues, however any concerns need to be balanced against the ramifications of not implementing such a technology when families are in need of it."

The structure of a cell

Nucleus: Where the majority of our DNA is held - this determines how we look and our personality

Mitochondria: Often described as the cell's factories, these create the energy to make the cell function

Cytoplasm: The jelly like substance that contains the nucleus and mitochondria.

Reversing menopause: new technique claims to ‘rejuvenate’ ovaries

A medical team in Greece claims to have found a way to reverse menopause, by “rejuvenating” the ovaries, thereby extending the window in which a woman can have kids.

The reproductive period normally ends at menopause, which in Canada hits on average at age 51. This is the time when a woman stops menstruating (i.e. releasing an egg every month).

But for some women, the biological clock is being turned back.

“Lots of women focus on their jobs, careers… [until] they’re past the age of 40, [and then say], ‘Now let’s go have a child,'” said fertility doctor Konstantinos Pantos of the Genesis Athens Clinic.

“In the meantime…menopause has arrived and they can’t have children.”

Pantos has helped find a way to potentially change that, using a blood treatment normally reserved to help wounds heal faster. The technique is called platelet-rich-plasma, or PRP, and it triggers growth of tissue and blood vessels.

His Greek fertility clinic injected PRP into the ovaries of about 30 women between the ages of 46 and 49, all of whom had already reached menopause.

The treatment has apparently been successful in restoring the periods of nearly 70 per cent of the women, including one who hadn’t menstruated in five years.

The team has been able to collect three eggs from this woman, according to the New Scientist. Two of the eggs have already been successfully fertilized with her husband’s sperm. The embryos are now on ice, waiting to be implanted into her uterus using in-vitro fertilization (IVF) within the next few months.

The science is controversial. Some medical experts have criticized the clinic for not following proper protocol, which is to first test extensively on animals before trying a procedure on humans.

Pantos admits more research is needed but insists the technique has been tried on mice eggs.

The other point of contention is the ethics of extending the natural window of childbirth.

“There are things that happen physiologically to us as we age that make it perhaps not advisable for us to be pregnant,” she explained.

As we get older, our organs don’t all function as well as they used to. And pregnancy can take its toll on a person’s body.

Critics argue that pregnancies in older women can cause “complications that can burden the system.”

Most pregnancies that you hear about in older women happen via donor eggs. Pantos says “quite a few women” from Canada come to Greece to be artificially inseminated.

The oldest women Pantos has helped impregnate were two 59-year-olds (That was before Greek law made age 50 the cut-off for IVF. A group is currently looking at coming up with an IVF age limit in Canada).

The women will be in their 70s by the time their children hit puberty.

Pantos agrees there should be a future age limit on who can undergo the PRP menopause reversal for fertility reasons. He thinks that should be up to government to decide, though.

“My job as a doctor is to help couples and women achieve pregnancy,” he said. And if the women are healthy, then “why not?”

‘The future is bright’

Heather Shapiro, president of the Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society, believes the group that may eventually benefit most from this discovery is those who’ve had their child-bearing ages cut short by early menopause

She says one per cent of women go through it before the age of 40.

“Obviously it’s a very interesting topic [that] could be beneficial to a lot of people,” she said, adding that ovaries have many other functions beyond eggs.

“The big one is making estrogen,” which may help ward off conditions such as heart disease. A decline in estrogen has been linked to an increase in heart disease in post-menopausal women.

She cautions against getting too excited about these findings because much more research is still needed. She thinks we’re still years away from being able to safely use this kind of procedure on people.

Dixon may even be closer than the Greek team to finding a way that helps more women get pregnant. She’s working with a group of scientists at reversing egg aging to improve egg health.

“I’m excited for what the future holds for my generation,” Dixon said. “We know the future is bright.”

The Greek researchers are also testing the PRP technique on women’s uterine lining, as well as on men’s testes to help counteract male-factor infertility.

“They have a right to have a child,” Pantos said, “and we have to help them.”

Stress negatively affects chances of conception, science shows

What many have long suspected, has been scientifically confirmed -- women's high stress reduces their probability of conception.

Scientists found that women who reported feeling more stressed during tAnnals of Epidemiology.

heir ovulatory window were approximately 40-percent less likely to conceive during that month than other less stressful months. Similarly, women who generally reported feeling more stressed than other women, were about 45-percent less likely to conceive. The results of the study recently published in the journal

In the study, 400 women 40-years-old and younger who were sexually active recorded their daily stress levels measured on a scale from one to four (low to high). The diaries also contained information regarding menstruation, intercourse, contraception, alcohol, caffeine and smoking. Urine samples also were collected throughout the study, and women were followed until they became pregnant or until the study ended, for an average of eight menstrual cycles.

Researchers calculated mean stress levels during each phase of the menstrual cycle, with day 14 as the estimated time of ovulation. They found the negative effect of stress on fertility was only observed during the ovulatory window, and was true after adjustments for other factors like age, body mass index, alcohol use and frequency of intercourse.

"These findings add more evidence to a very limited body of research investigating whether perceived stress can affect fertility," Taylor said. "The results imply that women who wish to conceive may increase their chances by taking active steps towards stress reduction such as exercising, enrolling in a stress management program or talking to a health professional."

The study also found that women who did conceive experienced an increase in stress at the end of the month in which they became pregnant. Taylor hypothesizes this could be the result of two factors: women became stressed after taking a home pregnancy test and learning they were pregnant, and/or most likely the increased stress was the result of changes in hormone levels caused by pregnancy itself.

"Some individuals are skeptical that emotional and psychological attributes may be instrumental in affecting fertility," Taylor said. "I hope the results of this study serve a wake-up call for both physicians and the general public that psychological health and well-being is just as important as other more commonly accepted risk factors such as smoking, drinking alcohol, or obesity when trying to conceive."

From frozen ovaries to lab-grown babies: the future of childbirth

It is almost 40 years since the first IVF baby, Louise Brown, was born. While this amazing breakthrough was highly controversial at the time, IVF is today commonplace. So how is conception and childbirth likely to change over the next 40 years and beyond?

The rapid pace of research in the areas of fertility and reproduction raises some mind-boggling questions about the future. Will we conceive and grow babies entirely in laboratories – making sex and pregnancy a thing of the past? And will all future babies be “genetically designed”?

One of the real game changers will be women’s ability to preserve their fertility and have children later in life. The procedure of freezing eggs was once fairly unsuccessful. But these days 80-90% of the eggs survive and women have a 97% chance of having a baby if they freeze 40 or more eggs before they turn 35. Another option is for women to freeze ovarian tissue at a young age, which can be thawed and put it back in the body several years later. This is still being researched but babies have been born using this method, and it is only going to get better with time.

Scientists have also successfully created sperm from stem cells and there is no reason why the same cannot be done for eggs. So in 40 years, women will most likely have several viable options to help them preserve their fertility. Hopefully, this will also be socially accepted and an affordable thing to do by then – empowering women to have children when they are ready.

But will these changes result in IVF taking over as the main way of reproduction? Despite an enormous amount of research, only a third of women are able to have a baby following IVF today – something that is unlikely to change in the next 40 years. This is partly down to age and the fact that even the healthiest-looking embryo has around a 30% chance of having an abnormal genetic make-up, which can cause miscarriage or genetic defects. Genetic screening before implantation is already used to identify these embryos, but future, improved “non-invasive” testing of the fluid the embryo has grown in will significantly boost IVF rates. Indeed, a century from now IVF is highly likely to be the “normal” way to conceive, making those who conceive naturally look like radical risk takers.

Of course, all this testing may inevitably lead to “designer babies”. Indeed, genetic defects will – or rather can – be eliminated in 40 years. We already have the ability to not only look for the most common chromosomal problems, like Down’s syndrome, but at each and every gene as well as the areas between the genes. In 40 years tests will be more accurate and the results available immediately, making it possible to identify embryos with disease or a high risk of developing problems later in life. While there are certainly ethical difficulties about this, it is hard to argue against choice if it is informed.

Hopefully by 2056 – and certainly within 100 years – we will also have the ability to correct abnormal genes either in the embryo or foetus using gene editing techniques like CRISPR. The foetal genome can be cut at any desired location and abnormal genes removed or new normal genes added. In this way, babies could be “treated” in the uterus, giving them a chance of a healthy life. The ethics aren’t straightforward but it could be argued this is in fact better than current screening programmes designed to identify and exclude rather than save embryos with problems.

Pregnancy and childbirth

In the 1920s, scientist J B S Haldane famously predicted that by 2074 more than 70% of humans would be born from an artificial womb. We are still a long way off that, however babies are coping with spending an increasing amount of gestation time outside the human body. Fertilisation can occur in the lab, as can the first two weeks of the embryo forming. Babies can also survive despite being born at 22-24 weeks – something that was unthinkable in the 1970s.

Even if artificial wombs become possible, it is likely to be highly regulated and restricted to a minority of women who cannot carry a pregnancy or those whose lives would be at significant risk. But as things stand there are already options for these women, such as surrogacy. For that reason, it is unlikely we’ll be growing babies in laboratories in the next 40 years. However, as the technology gets tried and tested, couples 100 years from now may well be watching their babies grow in artificial incubators with 24/7 live updates.

Are all women likely to have caesarean sections rather than natural birth in the future? An increasing number of studies are indeed showing that having a planned “elective” caesarean section is the safest way to have a baby – there can never be a guarantee that a labour will go to plan.

But there are risks. Repeated c-sections can cause the placenta in future pregnancies to attach itself so strongly to old scars that it won’t come off after delivery. This can lead to significant bleeding and the need for blood transfusion or hysterectomy. Nevertheless, it’s a rare condition which is more common in women who have had more than two c-sections. And given that UK families are only having 1.8 babies on average today, the argument for “caesarean delivery for all” will not go away. The fact that many obstetricians choose to give birth in this wayshows there is more to it than being “too posh to push”. The chances are that attitudes will change in the future and that caesareans will become the norm.

Of course, exactly what will happen by 2056 and beyond is impossible to predict accurately. While history has taught us that things will not stand still, we can be certain that the social and ethical debate is likely to be just as complex as the science.

More and more Chinese women freeze their eggs abroad

A growing number of single Chinese women going abroad for their eggs frozen to keep their options open and control their pace of life, reported Wednesday an article in the New York Times .

Over the last three years, demand for such services has recorded an annual growth of 10-15% in the US.

Most clients are relatively wealthy Chinese women, educated and having thirty years. In the US, the oocyte freezing costs between $ 11 000 (€ 9,800) and 16,000 dollars. And storage costs cost between 450 and 600 dollars for the year.

Increasingly boards of companies have begun to capitalize on this trend, providing services to "help clients with their visa applications, the welcome at the airport, accommodation, translators and even Chinese speaking drivers" .

Some US clinics have even opened offices in China. Six doctors now work for HRC Fertility, a chain of clinics based in California, which now has offices in a dozen Chinese cities.

However, the New York Times estimated that the growing popularity of this procedure in women is not yet up to the results.

The article cites figures from the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology: between 2009 and 2014, the number of cycles of freezing oocytes in the US increased from 568 to 6165. During this same period, the birth rate for "thawed" eggs was just under 24%.

"The quality and quantity of oocytes in women decline with age, especially after 34 years. And this procedure can have side effects. "

While this option freezing of oocytes was unknown to most Chinese women until last year, a heated debate on access to treatment against infertility and reproductive rights was triggered when the actress Xu Jinglei said on its Sina Weibo account, she went to the United States to freeze her eggs in 2013.

China bans against infertility treatments for unmarried women, and assisted reproductive technologies are not available for single women and couples, who are not in compliance with national regulations for family planning and population.

Reproductive medicine is highly regulated in China for ethical reasons. For over 30 years, the national family planning policy has limited most couples to have only one child, in a culture where boys are favored over girls. Surrogacy and trade in ova are also prohibited.