“Saviour sibling” transplant carried out in Britain for first time

A life-saving tissue transplant from a specifically created "saviour sibling" has been carried out entirely in Britain for the first time.

Megan Matthews, a nine year old girl suffering from Fanconi Anaemia, was given transplanted bone marrow by her 18-month old brother Max who was used as a "saviour sibling" to save his sister.

Megan’s condition meant that she needed transfusions every few weeks and was unable to fight infections. The girl's mother told BBC News her son Max had "completed" the family and helped his sister become a “bubbly and healthy girl”.

Andy and Katie Matthews, the girl's parents, from King's Lynn, Norfolk, said they carried out a worldwide search for a donor to treat Megan's condition, but without success. After finding there was no existing match for their daughter, they decided to use CARE Fertility Group's Pre-implantation Tissue Typing (PTT) programme.

They then underwent a £6,000 procedure, which included a single round of IVF at CARE Fertility in Nottingham to produce six embryos which were then tested for the disease and a possible match using Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD). All tests could be carried out in-house after CARE Fertility and Genesis Genetics opened the UK's first dedicated PGD laboratory.

While “saviour siblings” have been born before with the help of U.S. laboratories, this is the first time that medics have carried out the entire procedure in the UK.

Opponents of the procedure have argued that screening embryos and creating “designer” babies to save a sibling’s life interferes with the natural way of producing children and risks turning children into commodities.

Josephine Quintavalle, Director of Comment on Reproductive Ethics, said about Max:

“He owes his life to his capacity to be of therapeutic use to his sick sister, otherwise he would not have been chosen in the first place.

“This is the big ethical problem.”

In February 2010, a BBC documentary Having a Baby to Save My Child followed two families, one of which had spent nearly £30,000 on IVF in an attempt to create a saviour sibling. The documentary was described as only a “fragment of a much longer, more complicated story”. Writing for The Daily Telegraph, James Walton assessed the documentary as “less impressive as a moral debate – which wouldn’t have mattered so much if it hadn’t claimed to be one”.

“Critics of ‘spare-part babies’ were regularly mentioned, but only ever in passing,” he wrote.

In January 2008, the House of Lords voted in favour of proposals (118 votes to 62) to permit the creation of "saviour siblings". Lady O’Cathain, who put forward an amendment to ban the procedure, said at the time:

“To manufacture a person in this way is to offend against the respect that is due to the integrity of that person, no matter how compelling the goal of trying to cure.”

Sources

BBC News
Daily Telegraph
Daily Mail
Guardian
Press Association