In summer 2019, the Congressional Appropriations Committee voted to reinstate a rider to the Consolidated Appropriations Act that prohibits the FDA from reviewing clinical applications in which a human embryo would be intentionally created or modified to include a heritable genetic modification.
Prior to this vote, there was debate about whether to remove this provision to permit clinical trials to move forward for embryos that have germline modification in the form of Mitochondrial Replacement Therapy (MRT).
There have been calls by scientists and policymakers to provide an exception to permit MRT and potentially permit other forms of “therapeutic” genome editing for human embryos.
I submitted a Policy Memorandum on the issue describing the relevant issues here: