TEXAS TOWNSHIP, Mich. (WOOD) — A 4-month-old from the Kalamazoo area is one of only a few in the world with a rare condition similar to the one that recently took the life of British baby Charlie Gard. 
 
 Russell Cruzan III’s parents are fighting to find him treatment that could save his life. Even though doctors say Russell’s chances of survival are slim, his parents are hoping he’ll defy the odds. 
 
 Held by his mother in his Texas Township home Monday, Russell’s breathing was labored. 
 
 “It’s really hard to be told that your child’s chances of even making it to 2 are like 50 percent,” his mother, Michelle Budnick-Nap, said tearfully. 
 
 She and Russell’s father noticed something was wrong in early June. 
 
 “(We) kept asking the nurses why. Why is he not eating? Why isn’t he thriving?” Budnik-Nap recalled. 
 
 There were no answers. And Russell kept getting worse. Dehydrated and lethargic with a low body temperature, he was admitted to Bronson Children’s Hospital for a week. 
 
 Doctors treated the symptoms, but Russell’s parents say they weren’t ever given a reason why their child was sick. 
 
 Two days after Russell was released, his parents rushed him back to the hospital when he started having severe respiratory problems and then developed pneumonia. Russell was in the hospital for a month. 
 
 Still, no answers. 
 
 Until a test on his kidneys came back. 
 
 “When those labs came back the doctor called and she was like, ‘You need to bring him into the hospital right now. His labs are looking kind of crazy. We need to find out what’s going on,'” Budnik-Nap said. 
 
 The diagnosis was mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome 13, which can cause a loss of muscle mobility and strength, decreased kidney function and an inability to swallow. 
 
 Charlie Gard also had mitochondrial depletion syndrome. 
 
 The baby in the United Kingdom was at the center of a legal battle over whether his parents should be allowed to bring him to the United States for experimental treatment. Doctors objected, saying it wouldn’t help and could in fact hurt Charlie. Eventually, his parents ended their fight when it became clear that the treatment could no longer save their son. 
 
 Charlie died last week. He would have turned 1 this week. 
 
 After Russell’s diagnosis, doctors told his parents the the odds were against him. 
 
 “‘We know the seriousness of this diagnosis. We know what the prognosis is. Do you want to keep fighting or do you want to give up and let nature take its course?'” Burdik-Nap said she was told. “Which is a really, really hard thing to hear. But I always tell them, ‘Bo, we want to do everything we can. We want to fight.'” 
 
 That’s why she and Russell’s father are working to get to Boston. 
 
 “If anything if they can’t save him or whatever — maybe he can be used to save kids in the future,” Russell Cruzan II said. 
 
 They say a doctor at Boston Children’s Hospital, who is one of the top mitochondrial physicians in the country, has agreed to treat Russell if a doctor at Bronson can get the insurance company will authorize it. If Russell goes to Boston, he would get a treatment aimed at helping his healthy mitochondria replicate. 
 
 “I don’t want to say that we’ve come to terms with it. We love him more than anything in the world,” Budnik-Nap said. 
 
 They may be able to get treatment for their son, but insurance isn’t covering the costs. A YouCaring page has been set up to help cover medical costs. 
 
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 Reddit ||||| A 5-month-old local boy is fighting the same, rare life-threatening disease that took the life of baby Charlie Gard in London, despite a court fight over acquiring experimental treatment. 
 
 Local doctors say baby Russel Cruzan III might not live to see his second birthday. But his parents aren't giving up the fight. 
 
 
 
 Baby Russell has mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome. But his parents told Newschannel 3 that they're hopeful experimental treatments could save their baby. 
 
 Baby Russell is a happy little boy who likes to coo and grunt to his parents. A sweet boy with a lot of strength-it says so on his onesie. 
 
 “As many times as he's been poked as many times as he's been messed with, he just smiles and carries on like nothing ever happened," said his father, Russell Cruzan II. 
 
 His mother, Michelle Budnik-Nap, said, “He does, he'll cry for a couple minutes, then he's back to his little happy self." 
 
 Mitochondrial DNA Depletion Syndrome affects energy in his cells. 
 
 
 
 “Ultimately, it affects the major organs because the major organs require the most energy," Budnik-Nap said. "So right now he's dealing with some kidney problems, some liver problems, heart problems, definitely some muscle weakness, although we're definitely working on getting that fixed." 
 
 His parents say 50 percent of children with the rare disease don't make it to age 2. 
 
 “When we came in to get the diagnosis they just said there's no treatment, there's no cure. We would encourage you to take Russell home and enjoy the time that you have with him,” Budnik-Nab, said. 
 
 They plan on doing that, but his parents also say they're working to get him experimental treatment from a doctor in Boston willing to help. 
 
 “It's time to fight we're not taking no for an answer,” Budnik-Nab, said. 
 
 And in their fight, it's Russell’s strength they say will help them live his life to the fullest. 
 
 “Happy and healthy as possible for as long as possible. And when that's not possible any longer we hope that we have done something to help other children with his condition,” Michelle said. 
 
 Next week, the family will see a neurologist to check how Russell's brain is doing. 
 
 They're planning a golf outing and spaghetti dinner to help fund treatments, travels, and lodging as they work to save their child. They've also started a crowdfunding page to help with some of the expenses. ||||| Blackout Concepts/Alamy 
 
 It’s a boy! A five-month-old boy is the first baby to be born using a new technique that incorporates DNA from three people, New Scientist can reveal. “This is great news and a huge deal,” says Dusko Ilic at King’s College London, who wasn’t involved in the work. “It’s revolutionary.” 
 
 The controversial technique, which allows parents with rare genetic mutations to have healthy babies, has only been legally approved in the UK. But the birth of the child, whose Jordanian parents were treated by a US-based team in Mexico, should fast-forward progress around the world, say embryologists. 
 
 The boy’s mother carries genes for Leigh syndrome, a fatal disorder that affects the developing nervous system. Genes for the disease reside in DNA in the mitochondria, which provide energy for our cells and carry just 37 genes that are passed down to us from our mothers. This is separate from the majority of our DNA, which is housed in each cell’s nucleus. 
 
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 Around a quarter of her mitochondria have the disease-causing mutation. While she is healthy, Leigh syndrome was responsible for the deaths of her first two children. The couple sought out the help of John Zhang and his team at the New Hope Fertility Center in New York City. 
 
 Zhang has been working on a way to avoid mitochondrial disease using a so-called “three-parent” technique. In theory, there are a few ways of doing this. The method approved in the UK is called pronuclear transfer and involves fertilising both the mother’s egg and a donor egg with the father’s sperm. Before the fertilised eggs start dividing into early-stage embryos, each nucleus is removed. The nucleus from the donor’s fertilised egg is discarded and replaced by that from the mother’s fertilised egg. 
 
 Meet your mitochondria: The powerful aliens that lurk within you 
 
 
 
 But this technique wasn’t appropriate for the couple – as Muslims, they were opposed to the destruction of two embryos. So Zhang took a different approach, called spindle nuclear transfer. He removed the nucleus from one of the mother’s eggs and inserted it into a donor egg that had had its own nucleus removed. The resulting egg – with nuclear DNA from the mother and mitochondrial DNA from a donor – was then fertilised with the father’s sperm. 
 
 Gene editing: A guide to the genetic revolution on our doorstep 
 
 
 
 Zhang’s team used this approach to create five embryos, only one of which developed normally. This embryo was implanted in the mother and the child was born nine months later. “It’s exciting news,” says Bert Smeets at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. The team will describe the findings at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine’s Scientific Congress in Salt Lake City in October. 
 
 Neither method has been approved in the US, so Zhang went to Mexico instead, where he says “there are no rules”. He is adamant that he made the right choice. “To save lives is the ethical thing to do,” he says. 
 
 The team seems to have taken an ethical approach with their technique, says Sian Harding, who reviewed the ethics of the UK procedure. The team avoided destroying embryos, and used a male embryo, so that the resulting child wouldn’t pass on any inherited mitochondrial DNA. “It’s as good as or better than what we’ll do in the UK,” says Harding. 
 
 A remaining concern is safety. Last time embryologists tried to create a baby using DNA from three people was in the 1990s, when they injected mitochondrial DNA from a donor into another woman’s egg, along with sperm from her partner. Two of the fetuses developed genetic disorders, and the technique was halted by the US Food and Drug Administration. The problem may have arisen from the fetuses having mitochondria from two sources. 
 
 When Zhang and his colleagues tested the boy’s mitochondria, they found that less than 1 per cent carry the mutation. Hopefully, this is too low to cause any problems; generally it is thought to take around 18 per cent of mitochondria to be affected before problems start. “It’s very good,” says Ilic. 
 
 Smeets agrees, but cautions that the team should monitor the child to make sure the levels stay low. There’s a chance that faulty mitochondria could be better at replicating, and gradually increase in number, he says. “We need to wait for more births, and to carefully judge them,” says Smeets. 
 
 Two women, one man and a baby A Jordanian couple has been trying to start a family for almost 20 years. Ten years after they married, she became pregnant, but it ended in the first of four miscarriages. In 2005, the couple gave birth to a baby girl. It was then that they discovered the probable cause of their fertility problems: a genetic mutation in the mother’s mitochondria. Their daughter was born with Leigh syndrome, which affects the brain, muscles and nerves of developing infants. Sadly, she died aged six. The couple’s second child had the same disorder, and lived for 8 months. Using a controversial “three-parent baby” technique (see main story), the boy was born on 6 April 2016. He is showing no signs of disease. 
 
 At the clinic’s request we have removed the names of the family The story has been updated to clarify that it was fetuses that developed genetic disorders in the 1990s
– Mitochondrial diseases afflict an estimated one in 4,000 people, most notably in the recent high-profile case of Charlie Gard in the UK, whose parents unsuccessfully sought to transport him to the US for experimental treatment. The fault lies in mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited from mothers and is responsible for powering every cell in the body, per Quartz. Now a 5-month-old baby in Michigan has been diagnosed with mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome 13, which claimed the life of Gard last week. His parents will attempt experimental treatment in Boston, they tell NewsChannel3. With only a 50% chance of reaching his second birthday, they say at least their baby might "help other children with this condition." Russell Cruzan III, or "Bubs," first worried his parents in early June, when they wondered why he wasn't eating or thriving and was lethargic. After several hospital visits, respiratory problems, and eventually pneumonia, they got the grim diagnosis: His body lacked the energy to power his major organs. The couple doesn't have help from their insurance provider, per WOOD TV, so they've set up a YouCaring page to help with the initial test. This is the type of disease that geneticists hope to be able to stop in its tracks using so-called three-parent IVF, where a donor egg supplies a healthy set of mitochondrial DNA (37 genes) and the biological mother supplies her egg's nucleus (thousands of genes) without passing on mitochondrial diseases. (A baby was born in Mexico using this technique.)