After a decade of repeated attempts, a team of American and Chinese scientists has succeeded in cloning, for the first time, embryos of adult rhesus macaques to obtain embryonic stem cells, according to the British journal Nature .
The achievement belongs to Shoukhrat Mitalipov , a biologist at the Oregon National Primate Research Center, and his team. The simian embryos were obtained thanks to a technique similar to that used in 1996 for the famous Dolly the sheep, replacing the nucleus of an unfertilized egg with DNA from a mature cell from the skin of a ten-year-old rhesus macaque.
The objective of the researchers was to extract, from embryos of a few days, embryonic stem cells capable of multiplying to infinity for their application in treatments. This is known as "therapeutic" cloning .
Now, in the experiment, 304 female macaque eggs were needed for 35 embryos in the first days of their development, finally obtaining two stem cell lines. From them developed heart cells and mature neurons. This represents only 0.7% of positive results, if the number of lineages obtained is compared with the number of ovules used, which at the moment represents a great obstacle to applying the technique in humans.
