The entrepreneurial spirit may boost efforts to turn stem cells into fried chicken. It has already expanded the ability to clone dogs. If ideas like these could be tweaked just a bit, they could help spawn research tools the biomedical community really needs.
An idea that might boost cutting edge research (and save animal lives) is coming from a surprising source, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Saying that stem cell science could make in vitro meat possible, PETA has just put up a $1 million prize for the first candidate to make a palatable in vitro chicken product and sell at least 2,000 pounds of it over 10 states.
If PETA had picked pork instead, the research might have had some benefit for the biomedical research community (though it may also have facilitated more experiments using pigs.) No one has worked out a way to get robust pluripotent stem cells in sufficient quantities from species besides mice, monkeys, and men.
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After testing potential therapies out in mice and rats, researchers usually try testing them in larger animals, like dogs or pigs. Having stem cells for these species could make those tests more useful, particularly for cell-based therapies. (Eventually, stem cells could cut down on the numbers of animals used to test drugs.) Both dogs and pigs have been successfully cloned into whole organisms, which means that scientists are able to transfer a nucleus from an adult animal cell into an egg, generate an embryo, and grow that embryo in culture, and implant it in a surrogate mothers. Both cloning new organisms and making embryonic stem cells require culturing a very early stage embryos.
According to my web research, cloning new pigs means growing the embryo to the blastocyst stage, when the embryo is a hollow ball of cells, the same stage used for making embryonic stem cells; to clone a dog, even earlier stage embryos are used, so making canine embryonic stem cells could be even harder. But a team of researchers in Korea may be getting a whole lot more practice culturing dog embryos.
The dog cloning company in Korea could have revenue stream besides bereaved pet owners. A few months ago, I wrote about a California woman paying $150,000 in hopes of cloning her dead pet pit bull (named Booger). Now, an Associated Press story reports that seven puppies have been cloned from a talented drug-sniffing canine, a Labrador retriever. The cost came to between $100,000 and $150,000 a dog, and all seven cloned puppies passed a preliminary behavior, qualifying for further training. There are more tests to go. According to the article, only about three of ten dogs that go through the training regimen can be put into drug-sniffing service, even though the training costs just over $40,000 a dog. Assuming clones cost as much to train as normally conceived dogs, the technique would still not be cost effective even if all seven dogs make the cut. (The first set of dogs is a deal, since the animals are being made for academic purposes, the team has not requested payment.)
When I’ve asked around about why we don’t have more embryonic stem cells for more species, researchers tell me no one has had the patience or resources to optimize the derivation and culturing techniques for other species. Perhaps the kickstart will come from an unexpected place.