John Zhang with the baby that was the first ever to be born after mitochondrial replacement therapyIMAGE COURTESY OF NEW HOPE FERTILITY CLINIC
Last year, a Jordanian couple became parents to the world’s first-ever baby born through a controversial in vitro fertilization (IVF) technique called mitochondrial replacement therapy (MRT). Now, the doctors who performed the procedure, which involves inserting nuclei from the mothers’ egg cells and into donor ova with healthy mitochondria, have revealed more detail on the conception and resulting live birth.
John Zhang of the New Hope Fertility Center in New York City and colleagues published an account of the treatment in this month’s issue of Reproductive BioMedicine Online. “Certainly, this is a landmark study,” Dietrich Egli, a stem cell researcher at the New York Stem Cell Foundation, told Nature.
Zhang and colleagues revealed that the mother of the baby boy is a carrier of Lehigh ...
