In August the National Institutes of Health announced a five-year, $6.4 million grant to the Pittsburgh Development Center to continue its research into cloning monkeys and other primates.
In 1998 the NIH awarded funding to PDC developer Gerald Schatten to pursue issues surrounding the cloning of non-human primates. Schatten is a professor at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Medicine.
According to Schatten, the ability to clone monkeys and other non-human primates would allow for the creation of new and more accurate models of human disease while also reducing the number of animals needed for such research. Actually cloning primates, however, has proven difficult.
Most animal cloning has involved variations on that used to clone Dolly the sheep — the nucleus of a fertilized cell is remove and replaced with one from an adult cell. That works relatively well in sheep, mice, rats and other species, but in primates the removal of the nucleus also has the unfortunate side effect of removing the mechanism responsible for separating chromosomes during cell division. The upshot is that when the cell divides, the resulting cells have the incorrect number of chromosomes.
Schatten told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that in efforts using this method of cloning on 700 fertilized eggs from rhesus macaques that they were not able to produce a single pregnancy.
Schatten and his colleagues will use this latest NIH grant to explore alternative methods, such as inserting the adult nucleus before removing the fertilized egg’s own nucleus.
Sources:
Pitt gets $6.4 million to clone monkeys. Anitra Srikameswaran, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, August 30, 2003.
NIH renews $6M grant to study monkey cloning. Pittsburgh Business Times, August 29, 2003.