Veterinary Practice News October 2004

Company Says It's Ready to Clone Cats

Genetic Savings & Clone, a pet gene banking and cloning company, reports that it is ready to begin cloning cats for customers after the summer birth of two reportedly healthy kittens that were cloned by chromatin transfer.
The company, founded in 2000, reports that it has banked the DNA of hundreds of - animals and plans to clone nine cats in 2004—three belonging to staff and six for clients. The company says it will deliver the clones to clients by the end of the year and plans to start a commercial dog cloning business in 2005.
The first two cloned kittens were duplicates of a cat owned by Lou Hawthorne, Genetic Savings & Clone chief executive officer.
According to an Associated Press report, clients are paying $50,000 for each clone. Clients wanting to preserve their animal's DNA pay an initial fee of between $295 and $1,395, depending on the number of samples and type of processing and between $100 and $150 annually.
On its Web site, the company tells veterinarians that they play crucial roles in the company's business because clients are told to contact their veterinarian for initial biopsy samples, to be taken using the BioBox, a kit provided by Genetic Savings & Clone.
The company reports that it informs its clients that veterinarians might charge between $100 and $500 for this procedure, depending on the animal's condition.
The .company also says its chromatin transfer technology, which pre-tre,ats the cell to be cloned to remove molecules associated with cellular differentiation, is more efficient and advanced than nuclear transfer, the method used to clone Dolly the sheep and most other animal clones.
Nuclear transfer was also used to produce the first ever cloned cat, named CC, at Texas A&M University. CC was not an identical copy of her mother.