The world’s first child created using a controversial “three-parent” baby technique has been born in Mexico, it has been announced. Limited details about the birth were revealed ahead of the American Society of Reproductive Medicine’s scientific congress in Salt Lake City next month, where it will be discussed more fully.

The procedure allows women with a particular type of genetic disease to have healthy children who are related to them.
A report in the New Scientist magazine said the baby was now five months told. His parents are Jordanians and the work was carried out by a team of experts from the US.

The child’s mother has Leigh syndrome, (a neurological disorder that usually becomes apparent in the first year of life. It is characterised by psychomotor regression and in death within two to three years) and would have been passed on in her mitochondrial DNA. Although she is healthy, two of her children have died as a result of inheriting the disease: a girl who lived until she was six and an eight-month-old baby.

There are different ways of creating a so-called three-parent baby. The technique used by Dr John Zhang, of the New Hope Fertility Clinic in New York, and his team involved taking the nucleus from one of the mother’s eggs – containing her DNA – and implanting it into a donor egg that had its nucleus removed but retained the donor’s healthy mitochondrial DNA.

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Many scientists in the field insist the term “three-parent baby” is inaccurate as the significant DNA is still from two people.
Dr Zhang told the New Scientist that, as the technique has not been approved in the US, the team went to Mexico where “there are no rules”. “To save lives is the ethical thing to do,” he added.

Professor Bert Smeets, director of the Genome Centre at Maastricht University, said: “At last, the first child of a mother with a mtDNA mutation is born after mitochondrial donation.
“The safety of the method had already been quite convincingly demonstrated by the Newcastle group in the UK and introduction into the clinic would only be a matter of time – obviously, dependent on national regulation or the absence of it.

The procedure is still a little controversial and most countries do not approve. “A US-based research group apparently escaped the more rigid regulatory framework in the US to perform this treatment in Mexico.

Dr Dusko Ilic, a reader in stem cell science at King’s College London, said: “Without much ado it appears the first mitochondrial donation baby was born three months ago.
“This was an ice-breaker. The baby is reportedly healthy. Hopefully, this will tame the more zealous critics, accelerate the field, and we will witness soon a birth of the first mitochondrial donation baby in the UK.”
However, he added that “some questions remain

The Procedure:

The majority of our genes are located in the centre of our cells within the nucleus. However, a very small proportion of genes – approximately 0.01% of our DNA – are located in structures called mitochondria. Thousands of mitochondria exist in every cell (except red blood cells) and are responsible for producing energy. The DNA of the mitochondria is inherited from the mother. Errors in these genes cause mitochondrial disorders such as mitochondrial myopathy and Leigh syndrome.

In the 3 parent baby technique, the nucleus alone from the mother’s ova is extracted and inserted in to a donor ova from which the nucleus was removed. Now this completed cell containing healthy mitochondria and the mother’s nucleus is used for the IVF that will result in a normal child.