Cloning is cloned again: New Nature Paper is 3rd on Human SCNT

A new human therapeutic cloning paper is out today, the third in a matter of months. This one is from the lab group of Dr. Dieter Egli published in Nature demonstrating production of nuclear transfer embryonic stem cells (NT-ESCs) from an adult human somatic donor via somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT).

This human SCNT paper follows on the heels of a similar paper (Chung, et al.) from Bob Lanza’s group published in Cell Stem Cell and the pioneering Mitalipov human SCNT paper (Tachibani, et al.) in Cell in 2013.

Together these three papers have proven that human therapeutic cloning to make patient-specific ES cells is absolutely the real deal and that it presents a new therapeutic option based on stem cells in the years and decades to come.

This Egli group paper, Yamada, et al., is entitled “Human oocytes reprogram adult somatic nuclei of a type 1 diabetic to diploid pluripotent stem cells”.

Yamada Extended Data SCNT

So what’s the scoop on this new Yamada human SCNT paper?

The main conclusions fit with those of the previous Tachibani and Chung papers. Oddly enough, one of the most important sets of data is tucked away as Extended Data Figure 8 (see above) that nicely summarizes the paper’s data.

There are some additional technical data that may prove useful for additional labs to make NT-ESCs by therapeutic cloning of human somatic cells such as surprisingly the inclusion of fetal bovine serum (FBS; see the figure above, the far right two columns showing that addition of FBS seems to really boost the process of making NT-ESC lines.

This team also made NT-ESC from a Type I Diabetic patient highlighting the future clinical potential of this technology.

What about the bigger picture?

As I mentioned in a previous post providing broader perspectives on translating human NT-ESCs to the clinic there are some key challenges and I list the top 5 hurdles. I called human therapeutic cloning to make NT-ESCs the stem cell story of the year for 2013.

It’s still a very big deal in 2014. The two new 2014 human SCNT papers just raise the intensity of this story to another level. It will be a fascinating story to continue to follow.