WASHINGTON, April 8: Italian gynecologist Severino Antinori has produced a cloned human embryo of 20 cells, somewhere in Asia, he claims in a report in April’s edition of Scientific American.

“We have obtained a cloned human embryo of 20 cells,” he said, maintaining the process had been carried out at an unnamed location in Asia. He did not mention a date.

It was the second time such a claim has been made recently.

Massachusetts-based Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) announced in November it had successfully created a preimplantation human embryo, ahead of future work to extract building-block stem cells which could pave the way to new therapies to cure illnesses such as diabetes, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

But those embryos were destroyed at the six-cell stage.

Antinori declined to say whether he had implanted a cloned human embryo in a woman’s uterus.

His comments to Scientific American were made prior to a report in the Gulf News last week which said Antinori had said at a UAE scientific meeting that a woman was eight weeks pregnant following implantation of a cloned embryo. —AFP