Britain’s first genetically engineered human embryos could lead to dramatic improvements in IVF and help to explain why so many women suffer miscarriages, according to the scientist leading the project.
The fertility watchdog is expected to decide this month whether to approve the experiments, which involve knocking out genes to determine what role they play in a healthy pregnancy.
Kathy Niakan, a stem cell biologist at the Francis Crick Institute in London, wants to alter three or four small sections of the embryos’ DNA to understand why more than half of them develop fatal problems in the first week. The results could help doctors to achieve far better IVF success rates by allowing them to pick out the embryos that are most likely to survive