A HEALTHY baby boy has been born after he was conceived using a “three-parent” technique to manipulate his DNA, doctors said Tuesday.

    Fertility specialists from New York, Cincinnati and Britain did the experimental treatment in Mexico. It has not been approved in the U.S. It has been approved in Britain.

    It’s not the first so-called three-parent baby, but it’s the first time modern techniques have resulted in a healthy birth, the doctors said.

    The mother carries genetic defects known to cause Leigh syndrome, an incurable, progressive disorder in which brain cells gradually die off, causing a range of symptoms. The treatment, in which a second woman’s DNA is used to replace the faulty genetic material, is aimed at producing a child free of the disease.

    “She had four pregnancy losses and two deceased children at age 8 months and 6 years from Leigh syndrome,” Dr. John Zhang of New Hope Fertility Center in New York and Guadalajara and colleagues at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and Reprogenetics in Britain and in Livingston, New Jersey wrote.

    The doctors have given a bare-bones rundown of the experiment in a brief written summary submitted to a meeting of the American Society of Reproductive Medicine scheduled for mid-October.

    One ethics group questioned the decision to do the experiment in Mexico. The clinic declined further comment and declined to identify the mother.

    Leigh syndrome or Leigh’s disease is a disorder caused by defects in structures inside a cell called mitochondria. Zhang’s team used a technique called spindle nuclear transfer to take the patient’s DNA out of an egg cell and put it into a healthy egg donated by another woman, whose own DNA had been scraped out.

    Sperm was used to fertilize the egg using intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), a standard in vitro fertilization (IVF) technique.

    This method uses some cloning technology, and if everything goes as planned, the resulting embryo has DNA from three parents — the mother, the sperm donor and a bit from the egg donor. That’s because not all your DNA is in the nucleus of the cell. Some is in the mitochondria.

    The research team got four very early embryos growing using this technique and one was healthy and normal. It was implanted into the 36-year-old mother and developed normally. The baby boy was born at 37 weeks gestation, which is slightly premature, the team said.

    “The baby is currently 3 months old and doing well,” they wrote.

    The team said they have found small amounts of the donor woman’s mitochondrial DNA throughout the baby’s body.

    (SD-Agencies)