A human embryo has been cloned from a named person for the first time, in an experiment that also advances research aimed at creating replacement tissue that is genetically matched to individual patients.

One of three cloned embryos created by Stemagen Corp carries DNA from a skin cell donated by Samuel Wood, a fertility doctor who is the California-based company’s founder.

“Initially it was a practical matter, but once I saw the blastocyct and I looked at it and realised that I may well have looked something like that a long time ago, it was quite an interesting experience,” Dr Wood said.

All three of the embryos have developed to the stage at which embryonic stem cells could potentially be extracted for use in studying disease and making replacement tissue, though it has not yet proved possible to make stem cell lines.

The first cloned human embryos were created in 2005 by a British team at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The Stemagen achievement is essentially the same but genetic testing has shown authoritatively that the embryos are true clones that match the DNA of the cell donors, including Dr Wood. This is important because a South Korean team led by Woo-Suk Hwang claimed to have cloned dozens of human embryos and to have extracted stem cells, but it was discovered to have faked its data.

The Stemagen study is also new in that the donated DNA used to clone the embryos come from adults, rather than from other embryonic stem cells.

The work, which is published in the journal Stem Cells, could thus assist efforts to make patient-specific stem cells, which might one day be used to treat conditions such as diabetes, Parkinson’s and spinal paralysis.

It will also assist cloning projects designed to create cell models of similar diseases, such as human-animal embryo research at King’s College, London and the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne approved yesterday by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority.

Independent scientists said the new paper was interesting but chiefly because it had replicated the Newcastle achievement in a slightly different way rather than for breaking genuinely new ground.

“I found it difficult to determine what was substantially new,” said Doug Melton of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. “The next big advance will be to create a human embryonic stem cell line from cloned embryos. This has yet to be achieved.”

Professor Stephen Minger, of King’s College London, who leads one of the teams that will soon start cloning experiments with animal eggs, said: “This is good news, but we are still not much closer to using this technique efficiently, as we still need to use a large number of donor eggs to create a small number of embryos. Disappointingly, the researchers did not go on to do the next step: to create embryonic stem cell lines from cloned embryos. The community is waiting to bated breath to see if anyone can do both steps together.”

Professor Robin Lovell-Badge, of the National Institute for Medical Research, said: “This is another step along what has turned out to be a tortuous road. This is the most successful description so far of the use of the cloning techniques with purely human material. However, it is still a long way from achieving the goal of obtaining embryonic stem cells.”

Andrew French, of Stemagen, who performed the cloning procedure, said much more research was needed before the technique can be used in therapy. “The data we present are not in any way the final word on this topic, but, we anticipate, just one of many publications from a variety of researchers who will use a variety of methods to conduct and analyse similar experiments,” he said.

Miodrag Stojkovic, the editor of Stem Cells and a former member of the Newcastle cloning team, said: “These researchers have for the first time developed cloned embryos up to blastocyst stage using adult somatic [non-reproductive] cells as donor cells.

“This is a key advance in the development of patient-specific stem cell lines for therapeutic and drug development purposes. Although these results are preliminary since no stem cell lines have been derived from the cloned embryos, this may now be attempted.”

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