SCIENTISTS REPORT CLONING SUCCESS WITH COWS

WORCESTER, Massachusetts, June 3, 2002 (LSN.ca) – Scientists have successfully grown tissues for transplant which will not be rejected, including miniature kidneys and small “patches” of heart tissue from cloned cow cells. But the technique is unlikely to be used in humans because the law, at least for the present, does not allow organs to be removed from mature human fetuses.  The problem in studies so far has been that animals produced by cloning inherit some DNA from the egg rather than the donor cell, and these “foreign genes” create a risk of rejection after transplantation. They said that the fact that the sophisticated immune system of the cow did not reject the tissue provides hope “therapeutic” cloning (killing cloned embryos for healing research) holds out hope for treating humans.  The research, led by scientists at Advanced Cell Technology (ACT), in Worcester, Massachusetts, was published in the journal Nature Biotechnology. They removed heart, skeletal and kidney cells from the cow embryo and grew them into mini-organs. These were then grafted back under the skins of the cows from whom they were cloned. They removed the cloned cells after six weeks and found all were thriving. Another cloned set of cells was implanted into the same cow and were found to be functional after 12 weeks.  Cloning technology is opposed by many, news reports say, because it requires creating and destroying human embryos. The authors of the cow paper said they too are opposed to recreating their experiment in humans, saying it is ethically unacceptable to implant a cloned embryo in a woman for any purpose.  For BBC News coverage see:  https://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/health/newsid_2018000/2018444.stm