GoKawiilA needle approaches an egg cell (purple) during in vitro fertilization, which some clinics are offering in combination with a procedure called mitochondrial replacement therapy. Credit: Zephyr/Science Photo Library
A small number of fertility clinics around the world are offering a controversial treatment: a procedure to furnish clients’ embryos with donated mitochondria as a way to increase the chances of taking home a baby.
The method, called mitochondrial replacement therapy (MRT), involves removing the nucleus from a person’s egg or a couple’s single-cell embryo and transplanting it into an egg from a young donor. The theory — which remains unproven in rigorous clinical trials — is that the donor’s mitochondria might help the egg, after it is fertilized, or embryo to mature. Any resulting babies would have nuclear DNA from their biological mothers and fathers and mitochondrial DNA from the egg donor.
Scientists have already shown in a clinical trial that MRT can produce healthy children for parents whose mitochondria carry disease-causing mutations. But Nature has identified clinics in Asia, Europe and the Americas that advertise MRT to increase the success rate of in vitro fertilization (IVF) for a broader range of clients who do not have such mutations. “MRT can transform your fertility journey,” says the website of an agency called the International Fertility Group as of the time of this article's publication. The agency helps people find and receive services from fertility clinics around the world. (A spokesperson for the agency said that MRT is performed not by the agency itself but by partner clinics.)
It is difficult to confirm that all of these clinics are genuinely performing the procedure. But they are advertising it on their websites and social media channels. Clinicians and scientists — including some who think that MRT holds promise — broadly agree that this therapy is experimental and that, at present, it should be offered only as part of a clinical trial.
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“I’m pretty horrified,” says Richard Anderson, a fertility doctor at the University of Edinburgh, UK, after reviewing the MRT offering of one of the clinics identified by Nature. He says that the technique is difficult, the risks are high and the benefits are uncertain.
“They’re offering the treatment — generally very expensive treatment — to people who are desperate to have their own baby,” despite the absence of published evidence from controlled trials to support its use for infertility, says Mary Herbert, a reproductive biologist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, who has led a clinical trial involving MRT. “It’s fundamentally wrong.”
Uliana Dorofeyeva, the advisory clinical director for the International Fertility Group, defends the practice. “This is the patient[’s] right to choose the method, and to choose the way how they would like to solve their fertility problems,” she says.
With MRT added to standard IVF, “someone that's 40 years old is now getting results similar to as if they were 25,” says Kent McQueen, chief executive of IVF Asia Group in Makati City, Philippines. “It’s like miracle results.”
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