5 takeaways from STAT’s investigation of the sprawling ‘three-parent IVF’ industry

The investigation started with a tip from a British couple. After trying to have a second child for several years, they had signed up with a U.S.-based company called International Fertility Group (IFG), paying tens of thousands of dollars for access abroad to an experimental fertility procedure illegal in the U.S. and tightly regulated in the U.K. The procedure, known as MRT — for mitochondrial replacement techniques — is sometimes called “three-parent IVF,” because it involves creating embryos that combine the genes of a mother and father with a bit of DNA from the mitochondria of a third person. In the U.K., MRT is allowed at only one academic medical center, and only for the purposes of lowering the risk of passing on mitochondrial disease. But according to IFG, the procedure could also help older women overcome issues that make the odds of IVF go down significantly after the age of 40. Despite being a doctor herself, the woman in the couple had been taken in by the hope of a miracle. Her husband reached out to me concerned the claims were unfounded, and hoping STAT could look into it. Over the past eight months, my reporting took me inside an emerging international MRT tourism industry. It led me to IFG’s headquarters in an office park outside of Chicago and to one of its partners in Albania, an upscale fertility clinic where a Turkish embryologist living in Slovakia would fly in monthly to perform the procedure on IFG clients’ eggs or embryos. With the help of an Albanian journalist, Inva Hasanaliaj, we dug into corporate registration and medical licensing records. Freelance science reporter Edward Chen helped us to gather the stories of current and former IFG clients and interview scientists, including the world’s top MRT researchers. All of this reporting was undertaken in an effort to understand what is driving demand for this unproven procedure, what risks women are taking to seek it out, and how commercial claims stack up against the science. Here’s what we found. Currently, there are no peer-reviewed studies in humans supporting the idea that MRT can overcome infertility issues caused by aging, especially in women 35 years and older. A pilot study from a fertility clinic in Greece, published in 2023, reported that MRT could improve live birth rates for women under the age of 40, but the biggest improvements occurred among the youngest patients. For the 12 patients who were 39 at the time of MRT, the live birth rate was less than 10%. Researchers affiliated with IFG did present some data in a conference abstract for a 2025 European scientific meeting, claiming that among 66 patients with a mean age of 39, live birth rates following MRT reached rates of 40% or higher. But scientists told STAT the abstract lacked key information required to support that claim, and a conference organizer questioned whether it should have been accepted. The most compelling evidence it might work in older women comes from a single lab study in mice. But even the underlying hypothesis that mitochondrial dysfunction contributes to age-related infertility is supported by very little direct evidence, experts told STAT. And, in fact, data obtained by STAT shows MRT doesn’t work for patients of advanced maternal age Before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Kyiv was poised to become the MRT capital of the world. Women traveled from Europe, Israel, and the U.S. to at least three clinics there offering it as an infertility treatment. Unpublished data from the Nadiya Clinic — the most advanced operation in Kyiv — shows that a form of MRT called pronuclear transfer did not improve the odds of IVF for older women. Among 19 patients aged 36 to 44, only one gave birth to a baby following pronuclear transfer. In contrast, among 10 infertile patients under the age of 35, MRT resulted in nine live births. That hasn’t stopped reproductive tourism agencies and fertility clinics overseas from marketing MRT to older women For the past few years, International Fertility Group has advertised its MRT program as “a groundbreaking fertility treatment that offers renewed hope to women with advanced maternal age or a history of failed cycles.” The company’s social media posts about MRT frequently targeted women over the age of 35, and its own internal data showed its clients were skewing older. According to an IFG webinar from February, the average age of a patient in the company’s MRT program was 39.2 years old in 2022; last year it was 45.6 years old. After STAT contacted IFG about these materials, which several experts described as “misleading” and “unethical,” the company removed them. In a statement, IFG acknowledged that the evidence for MRT remains limited and emphasized that its role is to provide nonmedical support to patients. “IFG does not characterize innovative treatment as guaranteed, routine, or risk-free,” the statement said. “Patients are not promised a pregnancy, a live birth, or any particular outcome.” The company’s MRT program is currently on pause. Last week, hours after STAT’s investigation was published, Birol Aydin, the Turkish embryologist who performed the procedure for IFG clients in Albania, announced on LinkedIn that he was stepping back from clinical work to focus on research. Clinics unaffiliated with IFG operating in Mexico and the Bahamas are continuing to market MRT as a fertility treatment to women 40 and older as a way to combat age-related declines in egg quality. Neither has published any outcome data. Bioethicists worry about patients being misled and possible health risks for resulting children The concerns are twofold. First, that companies are profiting from selling false hope to people with a strong desire to try everything possible to have genetically related children. And second, that children born through commercial MRT won’t be monitored for any adverse health effects that might emerge later in their lives. Scientists still see promise that it could work better than conventional IVF for some forms of infertility in younger women Data from the Nadiya Clinic underscore similar results from that 2023 pilot study in Greece, showing that a different form of MRT, called maternal spindle transfer, could help women under the age of 35 with a history of severe infertility get pregnant and have children. Researchers at Ghent University are currently launching a small study of MRT for addressing these types of fertility failures, which collectively are called OZEMA (for oocyte, zygote, and embryo maturation arrest). Initial results are expected sometime next year. Positive outcomes would add to the increasing pressure to ease restrictions on human trials of MRT for infertility in countries where such studies are currently banned, including the U.S., so that people don’t have to go abroad.