Peking University Third Hospital celebrates a little girl’s 10th birthday!
Oct 04, 2024
Peking University, October 4, 2024: In September, a special birthday celebration was held at Peking University Third Hospital to celebrate the birth of a unique life ten years ago. On September 19 2014, the first in vitro fertilization (IVF) baby with preimplantation genomic screening based on MALBAC was born here. Her arrival not only brought happiness and joy to a small family, but also brought good news to patients with monogenic diseases around the world, allowing them to conceive a child free from their disorders, setting a new milestone in the history of the development of reproductive medicine.
This little girl’s 10th birthday not only marks the start of a new life, it also celebrates the scientific breakthrough brought about by Sino-US collaboration. MALBAC, a powerful single cell whole genome amplification method was first developed and reported by Sunney Xie’s Harvard group in 2012, and is the key technique in this project. Back in 2010, Sunney Xie was already a renowned biophysical chemist and then Mallinckrodt Chair Professor at Harvard University. With the support of his alma mater, Peking University (PKU), Xie co-founded the Biodynamic Optical Imaging Center, later renamed the Biomedical Pioneering Innovation Center (BIOPIC), together with PKU Professors Su Xiaodong and Huang Yanyi.
Since then, while still on the Harvard faculty, Xie shuttled between Boston and Beijing, collaborating with his PKU colleagues Jie Qiao and Tang Fuchou on a new approach to improve the genetic testing of embryos during in vitro fertilization. With the addition of Tang and Qiao’s team, the MALBAC technology reported by Xie’s team quickly moved from the laboratory to the clinic. In late 2013, the trio’s collaborative work was published in Cell, showing for the first time the possibility of clinical application of the MALBAC technology in IVF.
Thanks to the advanced technology developed by the cooperation of the three partners, the world has had more than a thousand MALBAC babies come into the world free from the genetic disorders of their parents, exemplifying the power of precision medicine. As such, on this important day, we not only celebrate a little girl’s 10th birthday, we also celebrate a significant scientific breakthrough, and the benefits of US-China collaboration. Click here to learn more about the science behind MALBAC, refer to our article written in 2014.
Written by: Sun Yi Wei
Edited by: Phoon Hui Yin, Andrena
Source: PKU Official Account (Chinese), ScienceDirect
