IVF treatment.
Meet little Noah – the first named baby born free of the “Angelina Jolie” cancer gene thanks to a groundbreaking IVF treatment.
Like the Hollywood star, Noah’s mother Danielle Taggar is a carrier of the faulty BRCA1 gene.
It means she will need a mastectomy by the age of 28 and a full hysterectomy in her thirties to reduce her risk of breast and ovarian cancer.
Her mum, aunts and cousins all battled breast cancer.
And Danielle, 24, did not want her own children to go through the same fight for life.
So she opted for state-of-the-art fertility treatment to let her embryos be screened for the BRCA mutation before they were implanted.
Carried out at CARE Fertility in Nottingham and funded by the NHS, Danielle started injecting herself with hormones in October 2014 to encourage her body to produce more eggs. Nine were harvested and four fertilised ones survived.
Screening revealed that three of them had the frightening mutation.
Danielle had just one embryo with a chance of success — and it worked.
Son Noah, who turns one on Friday, was born free of the gene, reducing his risk of developing prostate and breast cancers.
Danielle, who lives with her partner Mason Bradshaw, 25, in Blaby, Leics, said: “Becoming a mother was everything I thought it would be and more.
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