Scientists in South Korea, including one Pitt researcher, have successfully produced the… Scientists in South Korea, including one Pitt researcher, have successfully produced the world’s first cloned dog. The male Afghan hound puppy, nicknamed Snuppy for “Seoul National University puppy,” was born on April 24.

Scientists used somatic cell transfer to create Snuppy, employing the same method that produced Dolly the sheep, the first successful mammal clone.

In this process, the nucleus of an egg cell is replaced with the nucleus from a somatic cell – also known as a “body cell.” Therefore, the resulting fertilized egg contains not a combination of DNA from both the father and mother’s chromosomes, but genetic material solely from the male dog. The somatic cells that produced the genetic material for Snuppy came from the ear skin of an adult male Afghan hound. The egg cell was donated by a female yellow Labrador retriever who also served as the carrier for the embryo.

Although many other animals have been cloned since Dolly in 1996, cloning dogs has been a daunting challenge for scientists until now.

Because of the dog’s complex reproductive system, it was difficult for scientists to efficiently produce results. Out of 1,095 embryo transfers, three resulted in pregnancies. One pregnancy resulted in a miscarriage and, while the remaining two were carried to term, one died of respiratory failure shortly after its birth.

Woo-suk Hwang, lead researcher at Seoul National University, believes that through dog cloning, we will gain a better understanding of human disease.

“Using a homogeneous population of cloned dogs, maladies such as hypertension, diabetes, [and] breast cancer or genetic disorders, like congenial cardiac defect, can be studied more efficiently,” Hwang said in a National Geographic report.

Last year, Hwang gained worldwide attention when he and his team cloned human embryonic cells with the goal of using viable stem cells to one day treat diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and diabetes.

Hwang’s team beat an American company, Genetics Savings ‘ Clone Inc., in the race to clone a dog.

The commercial pet-cloning industry is expected to receive a boost from the success in South Korea. Commercially cloned dogs are expected to be available in the United States within a year, according to company officials.

While many people are eager to clone their canine friends, even dog experts are skeptical about the implications of commercial dog cloning.

Kennel Club spokesperson Phil Buckley insists that cloning is contrary to the goals of the club, which is “to promote in every way the improvement of dogs. Cloning cannot be used to make improvements because the technique simply produces genetic replicas of existing dogs,” according to the BBC News.

Hwang and his team are trying to distance themselves from the commercial cloning market.

Gerald Schatten, one of Snuppy’s co-creators from the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Medicine, said in an Associated Press report, “[cloning] is to advance stem-cell science and medicine, not to make dogs by any unnatural method.”

“As we treat naturally occurring diseases in dogs, we’ll learn about whether it is effective in our pets and we’ll also learn whether it’s safe and effective for our loved ones,” Schatten said.