Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) is at an unprecedented ethical crossroads: while France legally prohibits embryo selection to eliminate those with Down’s syndrome, considering it “eugenic drift”, in Silicon Valley the opposite practice is spreading: selecting embryos with supposed genes for [...]
Polygenic preimplantation genetic diagnosis presents serious bioethical difficulties Nathan Treff is the scientific director of the company Genomic Prediction, which, along with a few other companies, has been using “polygenic risk scores” that calculate the probability that someone will contract [...]
Last month, a team of 16 researchers, led by Dr. Akash Kumar, published an article in Nature Medicine dealing with the prediction of risks of transmitting common diseases by testing pre-implantation embryos produced by in vitro fertilisation. Several embryo testing [...]
Genetic embryo diagnosis tests called polygenic risk score (PRS) analysis, would serve to predict the risk of disease in embryos produced by in vitro fertilization According to Nature “A polygenic score (PGS) or polygenic risk score (PRS) is an estimate [...]
Non-invasive prenatal genetic testing NIPT is a method that uses maternal blood to detect fetal chromosomal abnormalities and other characteristics in early pregnancy, with no risks for the fetus. This makes it a promising method from both a medical and [...]
New possibilities open up in the study of the fetal genome In a recent Editorial in The Lancet, the author discusses an article published in the same journal (see HERE), which describes the study of the fetal genome after birth [...]
The American Society of Reproductive Medicine considers ethically acceptable for the physicians to refuse to transfer these type of embryos, despite the parents’ wishes After having performed preimplantation genetic diagnosis , the ethical problem may arise of whether the physicians [...]
