Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, whether the experiments recommended by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority's expert review panel in the publication, Scientific review of the safety and efficacy of methods to avoid mitochondrial disease through assisted conception, published April in 2011, on the use of maternal spindle transfer therapy on unfertilised human oocytes that have abnormal mitochondrial DNA has been concluded; and in which peer-reviewed journal his Department plans to make findings of those experiments available.

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority has advised that in its 2014 report the Expert Panel concluded that the scientific justification for this set of experiments does not outweigh the ethical concerns about performing them. The Panel’s reasoning for this was:

“Whilst it might be argued that it is useful to perform such a study, especially if any evidence arises to suggest a specific mtDNA mutation may have a replicative advantage, the panel recognises that it may be impractical to obtain sufficient numbers of oocytes or zygotes with mutant mtDNA for research.”

At the time of writing the 2014 report, to the Panel’s knowledge, this work had not been published in a peer-reviewed journal.