Studies Raise Safety Doubts About 'Three-Parent IVF' Technique for Preventing Mitochondrial Disease
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New clinical data from the UK and a Ukrainian clinic are prompting scientists and ethicists to question whether mitochondrial replacement therapy is safe enough for preventing inherited disease, with some researchers arguing it should first be tested only in carefully controlled infertility trials.
A technique known as "three-parent IVF," formally called mitochondrial replacement techniques, or MRT, was developed to stop mothers from passing fatal mitochondrial diseases to their children. It combines a mother's and father's genes with healthy mitochondria from a donor egg. Last year, UK researchers announced eight healthy babies had been born through the procedure at Newcastle University, the only licensed clinic in the UK to perform MRT. But the same data revealed a troubling phenomenon called "reversion" — where the mother's original mutated mitochondria begin overtaking healthy donor ones — at rates of 5% to 16% in three of the eight infants.
Separately, the Nadiya Clinic in Ukraine found reversion in two of six children tested, with levels reaching as high as 72% in one case. Earlier work by Shoukhrat Mitalipov at Oregon Health and Science University had first described reversion in a 2016 paper, estimating it occurred in roughly 15% of cases. A 2023 clinical study in Greece involving 25 women further confirmed it can happen outside the lab.
The findings have sparked an ethical debate. Jacques Cohen, a New York-based embryologist, is calling for a moratorium on using MRT to prevent mitochondrial disease until reversion is better understood. Bioethicist Guido Pennings of Ghent University argues MRT should be developed only in carefully controlled trials for infertile couples. Australia, the second country to legalize MRT, is preparing its own national programme, while MRT remains banned in the US under a 2015 congressional prohibition. Researchers in the Netherlands have proposed a staged approach to study the technique more rigorously before any wider clinical rollout.
