Baby designed to beat eye cancer curse that struck mum & gran
LITTLE Beau’s peepers are gazing at you today after LOSING a deadly disease and making medical history.
For the tot is the FIRST British baby guaranteed not to catch a CANCER curse that left his mum Belinda and gran BLIND in one eye.
Seven-month-old bouncing Beau Plowman was born after a pioneering genetic screening technique weeded out the hereditary disease before he was even conceived.
And as she held her miracle ‘designer baby’ close, overjoyed Belinda told us: “I just can’t thank the doctors enough.
“Beau’s birth has ended a blight on our family that has caused so much heartache.”
Genetics specialist Dr Sioban Sengupta, who worked on Beau’s case, said: “This little boy’s birth has helped enormously with our research–it allowed us to pinpoint the rogue gene.”
Belinda, 36, and husband David put their faith in the medical breakthrough to stop the son they longed for developing Retinobla- stoma–an eye cancer that attacked both Belinda and her mother Jean, now 64, at the age of five.
“I was diagnosed with it in both eyes,” says Belinda. “The doctors managed to save one with radiotherapy, but my right eye had to be removed or I would die.
His birth ended a blight on family
“My mum was doubly devastated because she’d lost her left eye to the same cancer at the same age.”
Belinda grew up believing she would never face that same heartache because she was convinced her illness–which attacks 40 children a year in the UK–had left her infertile.
When she met teacher David, 40, they planned a child-free life–but then she fell pregnant with daughter Tayla in 2005.
It was a miracle I’d got pregnant at all–but the nightmare was the baby would have the eye cancer gene.”
After a terrifying wait, an umbilical cord blood test showed Tayla was lucky.
So when the Plowmans, from Bournemouth, decided they wanted a brother or sister for their little girl, Belinda went for Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD) — the same technique used to produce a baby girl born earlier this month free from breast cancer.
Doctors removed Belinda’s eggs from her womb, screened them, then fertilised the ones without the cancer gene and replaced them to grow naturally.
She says: “We didn’t expect it to work first time and out of 14 eggs, only about four didn’t carry the cancer gene.
“But, thank goodness, two of those eggs were mixed with David’s sperm and we got two cancer-free embryos good enough to put back into my uterus.”
The brave couple went ahead with the In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) at University College London hospital in October 2007. They were told to check for pregnancy two weeks later.
Designer Belinda says: “When it proved positive we were over the moon.”
Beau was born last July. “Cradling him in my arms for the first time was amazing. He has completed our family,” says Belinda.
Dr Sengupta added: “When we heard Beau had been born healthy, we were overjoyed too. Ultimately he was the result of years of scientific work.”
