Stemagen Corp. announced that is has created cloned human embryos from adult skin cells using a technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) to create the embryos.
Researchers removed the nuclei of mature egg cells and then inserted DNA from an adult male donor into the eggs. The DNA was used from cells called fibroblasts which are obtained from skin biopsies. Of the reconstructed cells that continued to develop as normal embryos, three were shown to have identical DNA as their male donors.
"This study demonstrates, for the first time, that SCNT can be utilized to generate cloned human blastocysts using differentiated adult donor nuclei remodeled and reprogrammed by human oocytes," the researchers wrote in the study, which appear Thursday in the online edition of the journal "Stem Cells."
The researchers believe that the SCNT breakthrough could lead to the development of treatments for currently incurable diseases from patient-specific embryonic stem cells.
[Source: Yahoo News]
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