Embryos to be screened for breast cancer gene

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Offering hope: Dr Paul Serhal says the test could save needless worry in the future

Two women are set to become the first to have their embryos screened for the faulty breast cancer gene to prevent their children from contracting the disease.

The unprecedented tests will be carried out because the parents concerned have a family history of the illness.

By selecting embryos free from the gene that carries a heightened risk of the disease, doctors will in effect be creating 'designer babies'.

An application to test for the BRCA1 gene was submitted yesterday by Paul Serhal, from University College Hospital in London.

If the application can prove that the screening process in these cases will prevent the babies from contracting breast cancer, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority will almost certainly approve the procedure.

The body had already agreed to allow the screening process in principle in May last year.

Should the licence be awarded, the couples will have IVF treatment. This will allow a single cell to be removed from the embryo at the eight-cell stage, and tested for the defective BRCA1 gene.

Only unaffected embryos will then be transferred to the womb.

Opponents say the test is unethical because it involves destroying some embryos that would never contract these conditions if allowed to develop into children.

Even those that did become ill could expect many years of healthy life first.

And some critics fear that the tests move society farther down a slope that will lead ultimately to the creation of 'designer babies' chosen for looks or intelligence.

However, one of the couples - a pair in their twenties who would only be named as Matthew and Helen - said the technology would allow them to spare their children a devastating genetic inheritance which has seen three generations of their family die through breast cancer.

Last year Britain's first 'designer baby' was created after being screened as an embryo for inherited cancer.

The child has since been born healthy, free from the gene carried by her mother that would have given her a 90 per cent chance of developing retinoblastoma, an eye tumour.

The HFEA then ruled that doctors could screen embryos for genes such as BRCA1, which raise the risk of cancer in adulthood by between 60 and 80 per cent.

Previously, embryo screening was restricted to genes that carry a 90 to 100 per cent chance of causing disease.

The application is the first to be made under the new regime after a year of research to identify the precise-mutations that affect Mr Serhal'spatients. Approval is likely in three to four months, once the HFEA has confirmed that the tests are reliable.

Mr Serhal said that objections to screening ignored the harrowing family histories of the patients he is

seeking to help, who have a chance to ensure their children avoid similar experiences. "We are talking about a killer that wipes out generation after generation of women," he told the Times.

"You can have a preventive mastectomy, but this is traumatic and mutilating surgery that does not eliminate the risk.

"What we are trying to do here is to prevent this inherited disease from being a possibility in the first place. At least with these people's children, we can annihilate the gene from the family tree."

Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis is already used for incurable disorders such as cystic fibrosis and Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy.

A HFEA spokesman said: "Each application for conditions such as this must be considered on a caseby-case basis because of the difference in the way that families are affected by these conditions."

Josephine Quintavalle, of the embryo rights group Comment on Reproductive Ethics, added: 'There has to be a better way of curing disease than this.

"It is very likely that in the nottoodistant future there will be a way of treating breast cancer that doesn't rely on eliminating the carrier instead of curing the disease."

 

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