Friday, June 27, 2014
NYSCF's Cutting-Edge Research Explored In NY Times Magazine Cover Story
The New York Stem Cell Foundation's (NYSCF) cutting-edge research and pioneering efforts to prevent the transmission of mitochondrial diseases from mother to child is explored in depth in a cover story in the current New York Times Sunday Magazine.
The technique, pioneered and developed at the NYSCF Research Institute and led by NYSCF scientist Dr. Dieter Egli and his colleagues, involves transferring into a donor egg the nucleus of an egg cell from a woman affected by or with a family history of mitochondrial diseases. This would allow her to have a genetically related child that would be unaffected by this group of diseases.
There are currently no cures for this group of devastating diseases. Mitochondrial disorders affect approximately 1 in 10,000 people, while nearly 1 in 200 individuals carry mutant mitochondria. Symptoms, which most often appear in childhood, may include stunted growth, kidney disease, muscle weakness, neurological disorders, loss of vision and hearing, and respiratory problems, among others.
NYSCF experiments have demonstrated the efficacy and safety of this technique, making NYSCF and its clinical collaborators at Columbia University the leading candidate to bring this technique to human clinical trials in the United States….