Controversial Doctor Wants to Use ’Three-Parent’ Embryos to Treat Infertility Kristen V. Brown - Gizmodo
go to original June 16, 2017

What Is the Three Parent Baby Method? (Fortune Magazine)

Last fall, John Zhang made headlines after his fertility clinic announced that for the first time a baby had been born using a new technique requiring three genetic parents. The baby’s mother carried the genes for a fatal nervous system disorder called Leigh syndrome, but Zhang had been able to keep the disease from being inherited by her son by swapping in a donor’s mitochondrial DNA, the teeny bit of DNA where Leigh syndrome is housed. Since the technique is illegal in the US, the baby had been born in Mexico, where, as Zhang explained in a comment he might live to regret, “there are no rules.”

Now Zhang is taking his so-called “three-parent baby” technique commercial, and targeting a different market altogether: the booming, multi-billion dollar fertility market. Instead of focusing on women who risk passing on mitochondrial diseases to their offspring, he hopes to use the technique as a cure for infertility.

As the website for the company, Darwin Life, puts it: it’s a “revolutionary technology designed to reverse the effects of age on human oocytes and repair certain cellular defects.”

The company is already in the process of screening women between the ages of 42 to 47 who have undergone multiple failed IVF procedures to be the company’s potential first clients. The procedure will cost as much as $100,000.

But Zhang has many critics who argue that his technique is not well-studied enough to begin with, let alone ready to be sold to women for a six-figure sum for a condition it was not originally pioneered to treat.

Read the rest at Gizmodo

Related: A New Startup Is Commercializing the Fertility Treatment Behind “3 Parent” Babies (Futurism)

Related: New Startup Wants to Impregnate 40-Somethings with Perfect People (The Next Web)

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