Cloning of aged animals: a medical model for tissue and organ regeneration.
Cloning by nuclear transfer has great potential application in pharmaceutical protein production, xeno-transplantation, and perhaps most excitingly, therapeutic cloning. In therapeutic cloning a patient's own skin cells can be used to generate cloned embryos from which embryonic stem cells are isolated. Through targeted differentiation, embryonic stem cells can be directed to develop into the desired tissues/organs for replacement. The combination of homologous recombination of genes and nuclear transfer also offers the promise of correcting defective genes in humans. Demonstration of the successful cloning of aged animals is important for these future medical applications because degenerative diseases often afflict older adults. Our studies have demonstrated that skin fibroblast cells from aged adults, even after prolonged culture, provide nuclear donors equally as competent for cloning as cells from young adults or fetuses. These findings have paved the way for medically treating degenerative diseases of aged humans by tissue regeneration technologies made possible through cloning and homologous recombination.
Tian
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Kagoshima Prefectural Cattle Breeding and Genetic Institute, Kagoshima, Japan.
Kubota
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Yang
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D000367:Age Factors; D000818:Animals; D002454:Cell Differentiation; D019976:Cloning, Organism / Q000379:methods* / Q000639:trends; D006801:Humans; D023421:Models, Animal; D053652:Nuclear Transfer Techniques