What are the ethical issues? Researchers can screen embryos for a wider array of conditions, but they stress there are no guarantees.
Until now, embryos conceived through in vitro fertilization could be screened for a limited number of rare genetic diseases, such as Tay-Sachs and cystic fibrosis.
However, new advances make it possible to screen for the likelihood of a wider array of diseases such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease and psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia.
As part of the IVF cycle, women may have several eggs removed simultaneously to be fertilized in a laboratory. When parents have family histories for certain problematic genetic conditions, the embryos can be screened and ranked for the likelihood of carrying those diseases.
However, one key question needs addressing: Can screening actually reduce the probability that an embryo will develop one of those diseases?
That was the focus of a statistical analysis by a team of researchers led by Hebrew University Professors Shai Carmi and Or Zuk, along with Professor Todd Lencz at New York’s Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research. Their findings were published Tuesday in eLife.
For decades, couples whose offspring were at risk of developing a devastating childhood disease had the option to screen the genetic makeup of their embryos. In those cases, only a single mutation on a specific gene is responsible for the disease, and consequently, these diseases are known as monogenic.
However, most adult diseases are not monogenic, but rather polygenic – affected by a large number, sometimes thousands, of different genes and variants, each having a small effect on the risk of developing a particular disease.
The Hebrew University and Feinstein Institute researchers analyzed scenarios where parents were provided with the risk scores of their embryos for one given disease. These parents were then faced with two selection strategies: to eliminate embryos with a particularly high score for an undesirable disease and then randomly choose one of the remaining embryos for implantation, or to simply select the embryo with the lowest predicted risk score.