Dog cloning to be easier and 50% cheaper, says firm

CLONING a beloved pet dog is expected to be easier and perhaps as much as 50% less costly, a South Korean biotech firm has said as it unveiled a new cloning technology.

But pet owners — who have to shell out $100,000 (€78,000) or more to clone a pet dog — will still have to pay tens of thousands of dollars if they want to clone their beloved dogs and should be prepared for long waits because most commercial canine cloning is for working animals including sniffer dogs at airports.

RNL Bio said it has developed a new method to clone dogs using stem cells derived from fat tissue that greatly increases the likelihood of success.

It added that the new technology can also help in studying treatments of genetic disorders in canines that have similarities to human illnesses including diabetes.

Ra Jeongchan, the chief executive of Seoul-based RNL Bio, which is applying for a patent, said two cloned beagle puppies were born in the past week using this method which could reduce the cost of cloning a pet dog to about $50,000 within three years.

South Korea’s Customs Service said it paid about 60 million won (€34,000) to clone sniffer dogs with RNL, which is affiliated with Seoul National University (SNU), and cloned the dogs at a reduced cost for the government.

Canines are considered one of the more difficult mammals to clone because of their reproductive cycle that includes difficult-to-predict ovulations.