Haploidentical Transplants: An Answer to Ethical Challenges On the Use of Preimplantation Donor Selection

The recent article from Nickel and Kamani1 raised very important ethical points related to the use of Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD) by parents of children with sickle cell disease (SCD), as a method to avoid having another child with the disease and create a matched related sibling that could allow the cure of their affected child by means of a hematopoietic stem cell transplant (HSCT).2 The authors explain how it has become an acceptable procedure in our society, for these parents, to use PGD techniques to create multiple embryos through in-vitro fertilization (IVF), select one among those who are both healthy and HLA fully match, and implant it into the mother's uterus to hopefully have a so-called “savior baby”.
Source: Biology of Blood and Marrow Transplantation - Category: Hematology Authors: Tags: Letter Source Type: research