UK NEWS

UK’S FIRST BABY GUARANTEED FREE OF BREAST CANCER

HOPE: Women now have the option of having this treatment

Monday June 30,2008

By David Gibbs

BRITAIN’S first “designer baby” guaranteed to be born free of hereditary breast cancer has been conceived, it was revealed yesterday.

Doctors screened the mother’s embryos for two “healthy” specimens free of the inherited cancer gene, which they then implanted in her womb.

She is now 14 weeks pregnant. But the process has prompted fears among critics of a future in which babies are designed to order simply for their looks and intelligence.

The 27-year-old woman opted to have her embryos screened because her husband had tested positive for the gene and his grandmother, mother, sister and cousin all fought breast cancer.

She said: “For the past three generations, every single woman in my husband’s family has had breast cancer, as early as 27 and 29. I thought this was something I had to try because, if we had a daughter with the gene and she was ill, I couldn’t look her in the face and say I didn’t try.”

Had the London couple conceived a daughter from an embryo with the hereditary gene, called BRCA-1, she would have had a 50 to 85 per cent chance of developing breast cancer.

The woman and her 28-year-old husband went through IVF to create 11 embryos for doctors to screen using a controversial technique call pre-implantation diagnosis (PGD). The embryos were tested for the cancer gene by removing one cell when they were three days old.

Six tested positive and were rejected. From the remaining five doctors then chose two to implant. Two others have been frozen for future use.

An Israeli mother-to-be is believed to be the only other woman in the world to have become pregnant after undergoing PGD.

More then 2,000 breast cancer cases a year are understood to be caused by either the BRCA-1 or BRCA-2 genes, both of which can be identified in embryos.

Many women testing positive for either gene have their breasts surgically removed.

Doctors say this could be avoided by screening. But critics condemn it as unethical because it results in the destruction of viable embryos.

The couple’s doctor Paul Serhal, medical director of the Assisted Conception Unit at University College Hospital, London, said: “Women now have the option of having this treatment to avoid the potentially guilty feeling of passing on this genetic abnormality to a child. This gives us the chance to eradicate this problem in families.”

He has treated couples trying to conceive babies without other cancer-causing genes.