Ep. 118: ‘State of the Union’ on Biomedical Research
Bioethics on Air
00:00
The Role of Three Parent Embryos in the Treatment of Mitochondrial Disease
The three-parent embryo is a proposed approach, not therapy. It is an approach to creating an embryo that is likely to be unaffected by mitochondrial defects or minimally affected. The issue here is connected to a particular type of disease known as a mitochondria disease. As you're cobbling these embryos together to get around the mitochondrial defect, you're changing the genetic patrimony of that embryo. And then when that three- parent embryo grows up and has kids of its own, those mitochondria will be transmitted to her children because it turns out mitochondria are passed through the maternal lineage. So we've basically done now a heritable genetic change. And that's going to be passed on
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