Category: …and everything else

CC, short for Carbon Copy,
the first cloned cat.

Genetic Savings and Clone spun off Texas A&M six years ago, promising to revolutionize cloning through its chromatin (as opposed to nuclear) transfer technology. And specifically, it was going into the market of cloning dead pets.

Lou Hawthorne, CEO of the company, tried to cast the company from the beginning as offering a beneficial service to grieving pet owners, especially owners of mutts, whose “unique genetic material” would be lost; unlike a purebred, it would be impossible to get a cat or dog that looked just like the muttly beast recently departed from your life. The company said that the being of the animal was a combination of experience, intelligence and temperment, and that the last two were clonable and the family would need to provide the experience necessary to get a similar animal.

Needless to say, a lot of people didn’t buy that temperment and (especially!) intelligence is solely genetic.

On top of that, pricing a cloning service at $50,000, later dropped to $32,000, for people who want to recreate their mutt, seems to be automatically pricing most people out of the field. But Hawthorne was convinced that, by late 2007, the company would be both delivering litters of kittens and puppies, and making a profit.

Well, six years later, Genetic Savings and Clone has announced they’re closing their doors at the end of this year. Seems that cloning pets just isn’t a profitable venture – in fact, they only ever produced five cats: three research cats, one at $50,000 and one for $32,000.

That said, and it’s probably pretty obvious where I stand on the idea of cloning companion animals, I will give the company credit where it’s due: from the getgo, they publicly discussed the ethics behind their business, set up an internal code of bioethics that was published and adhered to, invited people to tour facilities on an as curious notice, and engaged in a lot of public debate with bioethicists, scientists and the media. They certainly believed in what they were doing, and went above and beyond all government regulations in animal care. They welcomed government oversight, so long as it meant that they were able to continue their own high level of care, and actively worked to shape the genetics/cloning debate the country had.

We might be on opposite sides of one opinion, but at least we would have agreed that it’s a necessary conversation that needs to be had, and had in public.

So at first, this reads like a woops sort of deal:
Drug research experts from the Netherlands say UK regulators did not receive findings that might have warned them of damage TGN1412 could do. Okay, the information wasn’t there, the assessors made their decision based on what was there – seems perfectly sound, sensible, and tragic. But when you keep reading the article, small things jump out and become alarming. For example,

In the case of TGN1412, the scientists from the German company TeGenero reported that the site in the body where the drug binds was identical in humans beings and monkeys. However, no detailed data on such a comparison was included.

So the assessors read a claim and simply accepted the statement of the researchers, not fact checking what was presented to them? The article goes on to say

When the Dutch researchers explored this they found clear differences between humans and monkeys.

The research file on TGN1412 also lacked information about how the drug affects certain human immune cells compared to monkey immune cells.

Dr Adam Cohen, from the Centre for Human Drug Research in Leiden, the Netherlands, said: “Essential information was absent.

So not only was essential information missing, but the information provided was inaccurate? What exactly were the assesors doing? Grading for grammar?

On top of that, the Lancet article

recommends drugs which affect the immune system, like the monoclonal antibody TGN1412, may be best given to people who are already ill.

This in and of itself is problematic. While yes, often times the only way to test the effectiveness of a drug is to test it against the illness, the first stages of safety testing should not be done in an already vulnerable population. What needs to be done is the assessors overhauling their practices to actually look at the data being presented and verify it for accuracy and completeness before approving human trials. Yeah, the pharma company appears to have lied, but this shouldn’t be surprising – the pharmaceutical companies are out for their bottom dollar, and they’re going to push things as far and hard as they can. The people who are there to act as a safety check need to actually do safety checking! It’s that simple.