Britain’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority said on Monday that it has approved a request by the Francis Crick Institute to perform human gene editing to help prevent miscarriages. The main objective of the researchers, led by scientist Dr Kathy Niakan, is to understand the genes that are needed by human embryo to grow successfully.

On one hand, there are fears over the new technique because it crosses a lot of ethical boundaries. On the other hand, according to scientists, new gene-editing techniques could open the door to discovery of treatment for medical conditions, such as HIV, or inherited ailments such as sickle cell disease and muscular dystrophy.

Niakan wants to analyse the first week of an embryo’s growth using gene editing. For the first seven days after fertilization, Niakan’s team will go from a fertilized egg to blastocyst, a structure containing 200 to 300 cells, explains the BBC. During the early blastocyst stage, out of every 100 fertilised eggs, less than 50 reach that stage, 25 implant into the womb and only 13 develop beyond three months.

The institute seeks to enhance its understanding of the success rate of in vitro fertilisation at the very earliest stage of human development, according to Paul Nurse, director of the institute, reports CBS. Niakan adds, “The reason why it (study) is so important is because miscarriages and infertility are extremely common, but they’re not very well understood.”

King’s College London emeritus professor of obstetrics and gynaecology Peter Braude agrees that the mechanism which the Francis Crick team would investigate are crucial to ensure healthy, normal development and implantation and help as well physicians refine fertility treatments. For Dr Kyle Orwig, professor of obstetrics, gynaecology and reproductive sciences at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, the Francis Cricket study is a game-changer, because “Not only will it broaden scientific knowledge about the safety and feasibility of human gene editing, it will reduce barriers to more expansive thinking about human gene therapy applications.”

Many researchers want to try the Clusters of Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR)-Cas9 gene editing technique used by researchers recently to eliminate facial muscular dystrophy. The technique replaces a problem gene and turns off the condition by sending a combination of protein and RNA to bind and overhaul a gene.

However, ethicists raise the fear of gene editing resulting in designer babies as parents not only avoid inherited ailments but also want better physical characteristics for their offspring in terms of height, physique or mental capacity.

In April 2015, Chinese researchers at the Sun Yat-Sen University edited the DNA of a human embryo for the first time, using CRISPR-Cas9, to remove genes that cause fatal blood disorder, but the experiment failed. That’s because, at the outright of the study, the embryos were not viable.

Britain is apparently leading efforts in pursuing gene editing. In 2015, UK legislators allowed scientists to create babies from the DNA people as a way of preventing the children from inheriting their mums’ potential fatal ailments. That made UK a pioneer globally in allowed the transfer into women of genetically modified embryos.

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