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We cannot draw any firm conclusions about MRT infertility from the trial by Wells et al. To begin with, it was very small. And importantly, there was no control group. We need to directly compare the results of MRT with those obtained using standard IVF in the same group of people.
Shukrat Mitalipov, an embryo biologist at Oregon Health & Science University, is working with Wells to plan a larger trial of 400 volunteers to better understand how MRT treats infertility.
The takeaway is a bit of a mixed bag. There is concern that MRT may not prevent mitochondrial diseases and may create children at risk of severe disease. But MRT trials in people struggling to conceive still have a lot of potential if they can tell us more about how infertility works and how to treat it.
Read more from the Tech Review archive
You can read more about the MRT trial and the two reversal cases here. In this piece published on Thursday.
Karen Weintraub covers the rise and fall of the OvaScience augmentation technique. Both of these pieces were published in the same month, which gives you some idea of how fast this field is moving.
MRT is being researched as a way to help trans men use their eggs for fertility. An earlier study showed that the approach helped produce more healthy embryos from their eggs, he reported last year.
Babies born from MRT technically have three genetic parents. Other technologies are on the horizon that will allow us to create babies with four genetic parents, or none at all. I explored what this means for our understanding of parenting in the last issue of Check Out.
While fertility clinics are trying to find ways to create healthy embryos for use in IVF, a biotech company is looking for ways to generate artificial embryos for research. As my colleague Antonio Regalado reported in August. The embryos are developed in a “mechanical womb,” as you might imagine.
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