14 DAY TRIAL // A British 27-year old woman gave birth to a perfectly-health baby girl, her doctors announced on Friday. The new mother, who wishes to remain anonymous, decided to have the screening because many of her husband's female relatives had developed breast cancer at some point in their lives, and she deemed the risk of her passing down the dangerous BRCA 1 gene to her daughter simply too great to take.
The infant was not genetically-engineered, but the embryo from which she formed was screened for the gene before development progressed, so now doctors can say for certain that if the child is to develop cancer sometime in her life, it wouldn't be because of this major risk factor.
"This little girl will not face the specter of developing this genetic form of breast cancer or ovarian cancer in her adult life. The parents will have been spared the risk of inflicting this disease on their daughter. The lasting legacy is the eradication of the transmission of this form of cancer that has blighted these families for generations," shared the head of the Assisted Conception Unit at University College London (UCL) Hospital, Paul Serhal.
"We felt that, if there was a possibility of eliminating this for our children, then that was a route we had to go down," said the mother last June. According to statistics, a female who has the gene also has an 80 percent chance of developing breast cancer, and a 60 percent chance of developing ovarian cancer sometime in her life.
In order to detect the existence of the harmful gene, doctors at UCL screened the embryo via a technique known as pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, which has been used before in determining if embryos resulted from in-vitro fertilization have genetically-transmitted diseases, including cystic fibrosis.
British doctors have approval from the government to use this type of screening since 2006, although similar procedures took place in countries such as the US and Belgium. Over the next few years, the demand for this procedure is expected to increase sharply, as the general incidence of cancer, in all its forms, in the global population is rapidly increasing.
Transmitting the flawed genes to their children is nowhere on the future parents' wish list, so it stands to reason that anyone who will afford this medical procedure will go on with it, to ensure the best possible future for their children.