BioCentury
ARTICLE | Translation in Brief

Pre-implantation improvements

How a new protocol could cut costs and improve efficiency of IVF screening

January 14, 2016 8:00 AM UTC

As the debate heats up over the morals of using gene editing in human embryos to eradicate severe genetic diseases, many researchers are calling into play pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) and screening (PGS) as less controversial alternatives. But those methods are still cumbersome and expensive. A group of Chinese researchers has developed a protocol that rolls the two methods into one, and used it to select embryos from two couples with genetic disorders, resulting in healthy, unaffected children.

In contrast to germline gene editing, which aims to eliminate a disease-causing mutation by removing or replacing the affected gene in an embryo, PGD and PGS involve screening embryos for disease mutations during IVF, then selecting healthy embryos for implantation...