The macaques were born eight and six weeks ago, having been cloned using a technique called ‘somatic cell nuclear transfer’
Over 20 years since Dolly the Sheep was cloned , history has been made again as the first monkey clones have been produced in the same way.
The macaques, which have been named Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua, were born eight and six weeks ago, having been cloned using a technique called ‘somatic cell nuclear transfer.’
Qiang Sun, a senior author of the study from the Chinese Academy of Sciences , said: “There are a lot of questions about primate biology that can be studied by having this additional model.
“You can produce cloned monkeys with the same genetic background except the gene you manipulated.
Zhong Zhong is one of the first two monkeys created by somatic cell nuclear transfer
“This will generate real models not just for genetically based brain diseases, but also cancer, immune, or metabolic disorders and allow us to test the efficacy of the drugs for these conditions before clinical use.”
Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua are the product of somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) – a technique in which researchers remove the nucleus from an egg cell, and replace it with the nucleus from developed body cells from another monkey.
This causes the egg to develop into a clone of the monkey that donated the replacement nucleus.
While other mammals including mice and cows have been cloned using SCNT, until now, researchers have struggled to clone monkeys.
To overcome this issue, the researchers introduced epigenetic modulators – chemicals that switched off the genes that prevented an embryo from forming.
They also transferred a nucleus taken from fetal cells, which proved more successful than a nucleus taken from adult donor cells.
Dr Sun said: “We tried several different methods, but only one worked.
“There was much failure before we found a way to successfully clone a monkey.”
The researchers now plan to monitor Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua to check that they are developing normally.
The research has raised some serious ethical concerns that this could lead to the cloning of humans.
Professor Darren Griffin, a genetics expert at the University of Kent, said: “The first report of cloning of a non-human primate will undoubtedly raise a series of ethical concerns, with critics evoking the slippery slope argument of this being one step closer to human cloning.
“The benefits of this approach however are clear.
“A primate model that can be generated with a known and uniform genetic background would undoubtedly be very useful in the study, understanding and ultimately treatment, of human diseases, especially those with a genetic element.”
And Professor Robin Lovell-Badge, Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute, added: “The work in this paper is not a stepping-stone to establishing methods for obtaining live born human clones.
“This clearly remains a very foolish thing to attempt, it would be far too inefficient, far too unsafe, and it is also pointless.”
