LONDON: Scientists have taken a major step towards cloning organs for patients suffering from cancer, Alzheimer’s or diabetes after creating monkey embryos and used them to generate bone and nerve tissue.

The breakthrough raises hopes that doctors may soon be able to take a single skin cell from a patient, create a clone from it, and then use it to generate new liver cells, for example, if the patient has cirrhosis, or fresh pancreatic cells if they have diabetes.

This could lead to cures for many terrible diseases, but news of the research - by Advanced Cell Technologies (ACT), the Massachusetts company that last month announced it had cloned the first human embryo - will only intensify controversy over the ethics of cloning.

ACT said that it created the embryo as part of its stem cell research. Stem cells are the embryonic progenitors of individual tissues - muscle, heart, brain, and other cells - and scientists believe that if they can make these by cloning patients’ skin or hair cells they could then create tissue that will not be rejected when transplanted into their original donors.

ACT has created stem cell lines in macaque monkeys, among humans’ closest biological cousins.

“Not only did we get pro-nuclear formation in a primate species, but we got early embryonic development, using the same process as we did in humans,” said Dr Robert Lanza, medical director at ACT.

“In the monkeys we actually derived embryonic stem cell lines that were able to do just as much, if not more, than human stem cells can do. Critics said you wouldn’t be able to use that technology to do it but this Science paper will show that yes, you can.”

Lanza added that the company was experimenting with these cells to identify cues that could be used to control their differentiation into different organs and cell types. “We’re hoping to get these cells to pick up the right environmental cues and, for example, put them into mice and have them migrate to the parts of the mice with damaged neurons from, say, multiple sclerosis. Say a patient has liver failure, the goal would be to inject some of these cell into the liver and turn them directly into new liver cells.” —Dawn/The Observer News Service.