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Infertility - what the future holds
Choosing the sex of your baby is already a possibility, though not an option on offer to most couples, unless there are strong medical reasons. It is also possible to freeze human eggs, thaw them at a later date and use them to generate embryos for transfer in an IVF cycle.
Treatments for infertility are continually developing and there’s no doubt that more major scientific developments are on the way. At the moment, research is mainly focused on two developments; blastocyst transfer and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis.
Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) is a highly specialised technique enabling the screening of embryos for certain genetic disorders. It can be used, for instance, to determine the sex of an embryo, where a family is at risk of passing on a serious gender-linked disorder, such as Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy, to a male child. Also, if a man and women seeking treatment are both carriers of the cystic fibrosis gene, they would be at high risk of having a child born with the disease. By undergoing IVF and then removing a single cell from each of the embryos, the geneticist can look for the disorder. Those embryos not affected with the disease can be identified and transferred to the uterus.
PGD is currently used on a small scale. So far, approximately 200 babies have been born worldwide – around 20 of them in the UK, where we have three clinics offering this treatment. Among the conditions currently screened for by PGD are cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, Hunter's Syndrome and spinal muscular atrophy. But the range of possible disorders that can be detected is expanding and also covers diseases that don’t occur until later in life such as breast or colon cancer.
The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, the statutory body which regulates, licenses and collects data on all aspects of fertility treatment and research, is monitoring all these developments closely. The authority rejects the prospect of using PGD to create ‘designer babies’ or to test for social, physical or psychological characteristics. The findings of a public consultation carried out jointly by the HFEA and the Advisory Commission on Genetic Testing are due to be published soon.
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