There is a remarkable new method for helping hopeful and fertility challenged parents see their dream of having a child come true. It is a technique known as spindle transfer.

Another term used for this new technique is the “Three Parent Baby”. It is called this because it utilizes a third party donor. This can go a long way in the future for the study in male infertility and conditions in women’s infertility. The majority of the DNA comes from the mother and father of the child, but a female provides donor mitochondrial DNA. This new method has been determined to virtually eliminate mitochondrial diseases such as Leigh syndrome, which is a neurological disorder that can result in death of the infant.

Mitochondria are structures called organelles that exist inside of the cell structure whose main job is to make energy for the cell. They do not contribute to any physical traits in the child so using donor mitochondria does not give the child any of the traits from the donor; it only helps in correcting the problem with energy generation. This helps eliminate inherited diseases that affect organs requiring a lot of energy, like the muscles and brains.

This new process with spindle transferring is the result of three decades of hard work by the doctor that developed it, John Zang. Full details are to be presented in October at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine in Utah. He did publish an abstract on the procedure, “First live birth using human oocytes reconstituted by spindle nuclear transfer for mitochondrial DNA mutation causing Leigh syndrome”, with the conclusion, “Human oocytes reconstituted by SNT are capable of producing a healthy live birth. SNT may provide a novel treatment option in minimizing pathogenic mtDNA transmission from mothers to their babies.”

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