In the United States in 1996 embryologist Jacques Cohen and others at the Institute for Reproductive Medicine and Science, Saint Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, New Jersey first used cytoplasmic transfer in a human assisted reproduction procedure. In 1997 the first baby was born using this procedure. In 2001, Cohen and others reported that ten single babies, twins, and a quadruplet at his New Jersey clinic and a further six children in Israel had been born using his technique. Using modifications of his procedure, a baby had been born at Eastern Virginia Medical School, five children at the Lee Women's Hospital Infertility Clinic in Taichung, Taiwan. twins in Naples, Italy and a twins in India. In total as of 2016, 30–50 children worldwide had been reported to have been born using cytoplasmic transfer.
In 2002, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) asked a Biological Response Modifiers Advisory Committee Meeting to advise on the technique of cytoplasmic transfer to treat infertility. This committee felt that there were risks at the time of inadvertent transfer of chromosomes and enhanced survival of abnormal embryos. The FDA informed clinics that they considered the cytoplasmic transfer technique as a new treatment, and, as such, it would require an Investigational New Drug (IND) application. Cohen's clinic started the pre-IND application, but the clinic then went private, funding for the application dried up, the application was abandoned, the research team disbanded, and the cytoplasmic transfer procedure fell out of favor. In 2016, 12 (out of the 13) parents of children born using cytoplasmic transfer at the Saint Barnabas Center participated in a limited follow-up inquiry via online questionnaire. Children whose ages then were 13–18 reported no major problems.
In 2009, a team in Japan published studies of mitochondrial donation. In the same year, a team led by scientists at Oregon Health & Science University published results of mitochondrial donation in monkeys; that team published an update reporting on the health of the monkeys born with the technique, as well as further work it had done on human embryos.
Human trials with oocytes in 2010 by Craven et al. were successful in reducing transmission of mutated mtDNA. The results of the study found the mean transfer DNA (tDNA) carryover to stay under 2% in all of the experimental embryos. This was true for both the MI-SCC and PN transfer methods of MTR. This research did not extend past the blastocyst stage because of ethical concerns, and there are still concerns about whether results retrieved from the blastocyst stage are viable representations of whole embryos. Because of these speculations and to further the viability of MTR as a safe and effective technique, further research and clinical trials would need to be initiated to test the efficacy of MTR in the long term in human patients.