In a first, doctors treat fatal genetic disease before birth

A toddler is thriving after doctors in the U.S. and Canada used a novel technique to treat her before she was born for a rare genetic disease that caused the deaths of two of her sisters.

Ayla Bashir, a 16-month-old from Ottawa, Ontario, is the first child treated as fetus for Pompe disease, an inherited and often fatal disorder in which the body fails to make some or all of a crucial protein.

Today, she’s an active, happy girl who has met her developmental milestones, according to her father, Zahid Bashir and mother, Sobia Qureshi.

“She’s just a regular little one-and-a-half year old who keeps us on our toes,” Bashir said. The couple previously lost two daughters, Zara, 2 ½, and Sara, 8 months, to the disease. A third pregnancy was terminated because of the disorder.