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CANBERRA (Reuters) - Human therapeutic cloning has moved a step closer after U.S. researchers said they had successfully created embyonic stem cells from monkey embryos.
In what would be a world-first breakthrough, scientists told a stem cell research conference in the Australian city of Cairns this week that they had successfully created two batches of embryonic stem cells from cloned rhesus monkey embryos.
"We've been looking for this evidence for a long time," Australian stem cell pioneer Alan Trounson from the Melbourne-based Monash University Stem Cell Centre told Reuters.
"It's very important to have this, to know that we can do this, because it may result in a lot of new cell lines than can help us understand some complex diseases."
Previous efforts to obtain embryonic stem cells from cloned primate embryos have failed. Korean cloning scientist Woo Sook Hwang lost his job over fabricated successes using human eggs.
But Shoukhrat Mitalipov of the Oregon National Primate Research Centre in the United States said he had succeeded using modified Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer, or SCNT, in which an egg cell...
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