ViaGen in the News
Cloning ‘powerful’ new tool
By Rod Smith, Feedstuffs
May 14, 2007
Cloning is a new reproductive technology that will benefit livestock producers and consumers, and meat and milk produced through this technology are safe and wholesome.
CLONING is an important technology that will improve the food chain from farm to fork.
It’s a technology that will allow producers to multiply and preserve the value of their best-performing genetics. It’s a technology that will allow producers to provide “better” meat and milk with the quality traits consumers want.
It’s a technology that will be positive for the environment, animal health and even human well-being.
It’s a new tool for producers. Certainly, it’s another form of “assisted reproductive technology” like artificial insemination and embryo transfer, but it’s new because it provides faster and more promising results.
“It’s another reproductive tool, but it’s a powerful tool,” said Blake Russell, vice president for business development and sales at ViaGen, the leading specialist in cloning technology in the U.S.
First in a series
Russell, ViaGen president Dr. Mark Walton and director of industry relations and policy Leah Wilkinson met with Feedstuffs last month at their offices in Austin, Texas, to talk about cloning as the Food & Drug Administration moves closer to a final rule that will find meat and milk from animals produced from the technology to be safe.
The wording is important. First, cloning is an accepted and proven reproductive tool, and some superior-performing cattle, swine and horses already have been cloned — from Forever Lady, a prized Angus cow, to the champion gelding Scamper.
Second, animal clones will not be produced to harvest meat or milk but, rather, to be conventionally bred for superior offspring. It is the meat and milk from those conventionally bred animals that will be marketed through the food chain.
Third, FDA’s responsibility is to determine the safety of the meat and milk. The agency released a draft risk assessment from its Center for Veterinary Medicine last year in which the center found meat and milk from animal clones or their offspring to be indistinguishable from other meat and milk and safe to consume (Feedstuffs, Jan. 1).
FDA’s risk assessment was an exhaustive, fully disclosed, peer-reviewed, five-year review of more than 400 scientific journal articles, as well as an analysis of the health records and meat and milk from animal clones and their offspring. The preliminary report was more than 800 pages long.
FDA’s risk assessment was the largest food safety study ever conducted, according to Walton.
FDA received comments on its report through May 3 and will issue a final rule after reviewing the comments.
One clarification needs to be made to this scenario. The application of cloning technology is very expensive — $15,000 for the first copy of a bovine — which means that only the champion of champions — the top performer of top performers — will be cloned. In the case of beef and dairy cattle, goats and swine, clones will be produced to be bred conventionally to produce animals for commercial herds.
It will only be at the end of the clone’s reproductive lifetime that the animal may be processed for food, which FDA concluded in its risk assessment is safe and wholesome.
However, Walton said ViaGen and other companies providing cloning technology are developing a management program that will individually identify clones so they can be tracked and kept out of any part of the food chain — a restaurant, for example — that does not want meat and milk from the clones.
“We’re working to educate the food industry” that the meat and milk going into the food system will be from commercial livestock and that it’s “completely indistinguishable” from commercial livestock that are not offspring of clones. “There is no difference” between the products of the two, he said. “Like bovine somatotropin, it’s impossible to (find a difference).”
“The progeny of clones are not clones,” Wilkinson emphasized.
Consumers will not be made to drink milk or eat meat from clones, and there is no such thing as “cloned milk” or “cloned meat,” Walton and Wilkinson said.
(EDITOR’S NOTE: Part two of this series will cover who will clone and why they will clone.)
FYI
Most bananas, apples, grapes, pears, peaches and potatoes consumers buy in local supermarkets and eat today are produced using cloning technology. Other cloning facts are available at www.fda.gov/cvm/CloningRA_Myths.htm.
About ViaGen
VIAGEN was established in Austin, Texas, by a group of geneticists and other researchers with Austin-based Genomic FX, a start-up tech company that provided DNA testing services but went out of business in the NASDAQ market collapse of 2001.
The group was headed by Dr. Scott Davis, who co-founded Genomic FX and previously was chair of genetics faculty at Texas A&M University. The group secured private funding and founded ViaGen in 2002.
In its early projects, ViaGen was involved in functional genomics and the identification of disease-resistant shrimp, but in 2003, it acquired ProLinia, an animal cloning pioneer, and combined ProLinia’s expertise in cloning with its own knowledge of genomics to transition into assisted reproductive services (Feedstuffs, July 7, 2003).
The acquisition gave ViaGen access to the cloning platform the Roslin Institute used to clone “Dolly,” and that was subsequently acquired by ProLinia.
ViaGen cloned its first animal, a pig, in 2003 and has since then cloned cattle and horses. Most of its work involves performance, or show, animals, but in anticipation of the Food & Drug Administration’s final rule this year on the safety of milk and meat from animals produced from clones, the company recently partnered with Trans Ova Genetics to offer cloning services to the cattle industry (Feedstuffs, April 23).
ViaGen also is involved in gene banking, a process that preserves animal genes for long-term storage in liquid nitrogen, i.e., cryopreservation. Animal owners may choose to bank an animal’s genes if the animal is particularly valuable and they want to possibly duplicate it in the future to multiply that value or if the animal becomes injured or dies unexpectedly.
The company has no plans to clone animals other than cattle, swine and horses but will gene bank any mammal other than primates, according to president Dr. Mark Walton. “We have quite a variety of mammalian DNA in our cryopreservation tanks,” he said, including DNA from antelopes, buffaloes and a lion.
The company opened ViaGen de Mexico earlier this year and also has offices in Canada. It is expected that many countries, especially in Latin America, will follow FDA’s lead, according to director of business development and sales Blake Russell. Argentina and Brazil will present “immediate opportunities,” he said.
ViaGen currently is owned by a number of equity investment interests, and ViaGen and Cyagra in Elizabethtown, Pa., are regarded as the leading specialists in the U.S. in cloning technology.
The two companies maintain a joint web site to answer questions about cloning at www.clonesafety.org.