21. 08. 2025
Reading time: 3 minutes
Mother, father and donor: A groundbreaking scientific method seems to work very well ten years after its controversial legalisation. The United Kingdom is the only country where the law allows doctors to combine the DNA of three people during in vitro fertilisation (IVF) in an attempt to protect the child from serious and often fatal hereditary diseases. A team of doctors at Newcastle University has already brought eight healthy children into the world who, in addition to their mother’s and father’s DNA, also have genetic information from a donor. The procedure offers hope for a healthy child to women who are at high risk of passing on a so-called mitochondrial disease, which is often fatal. Simply put, during IVF, the donor gives the parents an egg without a nucleus but with healthy mitochondria.
Mitochondria are inherited from our mothers, and when they’re defective, they can cause various serious and unpredictable problems. Sometimes the damage does not manifest itself at all; other times it can appear later in life, for example, in the form of muscle weakness. However, in approximately one in five thousand children, the damage is severe, leading to gradual organ failure and often death at an early age. There is currently no effective treatment.
The method used in the UK to prevent the transmission of defective mitochondria involves doctors fertilising two eggs – one from the mother and one from a donor – with the father’s sperm. They then remove the so-called pronuclei from both eggs. The pronuclei from the mother and father are then placed in an egg with healthy cytoplasm from the donor. The resulting embryo, with a complete set of chromosomes from the parents and donated healthy mitochondria, is then transferred to the mother’s uterus. The pregnancy then proceeds normally.
“From a technical point of view, the procedure itself is not so complicated, ” comments Helena Fulková, a reproductive biologist and head of the Department of Cell Nucleus Plasticity from the IEM CAS, who is conducting further research on animals. Last year, she and her colleagues published a study (open in a new window) describing the key stages of the process and the critical time points for achieving the best results using this method in an animal model. The team is also looking into alternatives that would not require the destruction of viable embryos from donors.
There are no plans to legalise the method in the Czech Republic at this time. Clinics can only offer women at high risk of transmission IVF using donated eggs. A child born this way will have the genes of the donor, not the mother. Czech clinics do not offer the British procedure. “We have the experts who could do it and the technical capacity, but implementing a new method requires cooperation between scientists, doctors, and politicians, and mainly the desire to change something,” says Helena Fulková.
The full article can be found on the Respekt Magazine website (open in a new window – only available in Czech).
Source: Respekt Magazine / Markéta Plíhalová