Mitochondrial swapping technology may help reduce the risk of childhood diseases

New technology is being developed that may help parents who are trying to start a family. Scientists are using technology that may help create healthy babies by "swapping" genetic material of unfertilized eggs and thus reducing the chances of newborn children acquiring diseases that are caused by defects in the mother's mitochondria.  Diseases of this kind affect about 1 in 4,000 children, Scientific American reports. Although rare, diseases resulting from this defect are often fatal to children.  Because mitochondria are inherited from mothers, this technology will allow for mothers who have a high risk of passing on these rare diseases to their children have their defective mitochondria replaced.

The same process conducted on Rhesus monkeys by Shoukhrat Mitalipov and his team from Oregon Health and Science University has taken place about three years ago and has been successful. According to Scientific American, Mitalipov and his team created eggs with mitochondria from a donor and these eggs have developed into health Rhesus monkeys. The way Mitalipov and his team conducted this process involved removing the nucleus from an unfertilized egg, in which the cell's mitochondria remained. They then injected that particular cell into another cell that also had it's nucleus removed, and this newly altered egg was then fertilized in vitro. When a follow up of the status of the Rhesus monkeys was conducted, there were no abnormalities reported and in fact, this process also worked on frozen eggs.

When this was conducted on human oocytes, Mitalipov and his team, according to Scientific American, had to develop the embryos to the blastocyst stage and conduct tests on these embryos. However, these embryos contained the mitochondria of the donor.  There is still skepticism on this new technique. There is still apprehension surrounding the long term effect if this process was to be made available to the public, such as the ability for these offspring with newly replaced mitochondria to be able to produce  their own offspring with effective mitochondria. Also, there was also some complications during the process, which included abnormal fertilization, which led to excess maternal nuclear DNA material and the approval from the FDA. An ethical issue that this new process faces is the support from the NIH because it does not fund research that involves the termination of human embryos. Also, approval from the FDA may also be put to a halt due to the issue of creating babies that technically have three parents: the mother, father and the donor.