Beaverton primate center researchers achieve genetic disorder breakthrough

By Stover E Harger III

The Beaverton Valley Times, Sep 10, 2009, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Jonathan House / Beaverton Valley Times

GOOD GENES — This family of rhesus macaques lives at the Oregon National Primate Research Center in Beaverton.

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It might involve monkeys, but it’s no monkey business.

Scientists at the Oregon National Primate Research Center – with the help of their rhesus macaque test subjects – have recently achieved a research breakthrough that could help combat inherited diseases passed on from mothers to their children.

Within the labs of the Oregon Health & Science University’s Beaverton center, located at 505 N.W. 185th Ave., associate scientist in the Division of Reproductive Sciences Shoukhrat Mitalipov, led a team looking to find a way that mothers with certain types of inheritable diseases, such as forms of cancer, diabetes and infertility, could have a healthy child.

To do this, they targeted mutated DNA in the mitochondria of cells. Mitochondria provide energy for cell growth, but can also hold blueprints for defects and health problems that can be passed down through generations. What Mitalipov and other researchers learned from performing experiments on the monkeys is that it is possible – but still tricky – to combine healthy mitochondrion from one female’s unfertilized egg with the rest of the egg from another female, minus the mutated mitochondrion.

It’s called a “spindle transfer” and it’s like an organ transplant, but microscopic.

The theory was tested extensively and eventually the research center created, apparently healthy, baby twin monkeys – “Mito” and “Tracker” – that were the very first animals created this way. Now there are four babies total created from this process, with follow-up testing showing that there was “little to no” trace of cross-animal mitochondrial transfer.

What this means for humans suffering from diseases related to mitochondrial DNA, including cases of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, isn’t proven, but there is a strong feeling within the primate center that it could mean great things – giving parents with these genetic diseases the ability to have healthy children with nearly 100 percent of their genetic material.

“We believe this discovery in nonhuman primates can rapidly be translated into human therapies aimed at preventing inherited disorders passed from mothers to their children,” said Mitalipov, who in 2007 also led a primate center research team that was the first to extract primate embryonic stem cells from cloned primate embryos.

The process of spindle transfer involves two females and a male. At the primate center, researchers took unfertilized eggs from two female rhesus macaque monkeys, removed the chromosomes from one and replaced them with the chromosomes from the other. The egg from the second monkey, which now contained most of the genetic material from the first monkey, but its own healthy mitochondrion, was fertilized and implanted in a surrogate mother. And viola, healthy monkeys were born.

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