The experiment represents another advance in the quest to make tissue in the laboratory that could treat a range of maladies, from heart attacks to Alzheimer’s. The study, involving a 35-year-old man and one age 75, was published Thursday in the journal Cell Stem Cell.
The creation of the first early-stage human clones, using infant and fetal cells rather than those from adults, was reported last year. The new experiment, with a few tweaks, confirms that striking and controversial breakthrough and also shows the technique works on mature cells.
“The proportion of diseases you can treat with [lab-made tissue] increases with age. So if you can’t do this with adult cells, it is of limited value,” said Robert Lanza, co-author of the study and chief scientific officer at Advanced Cell Technology Inc. ACTC +1.43% of Marlborough, Mass. The study was funded in part by the government of Korea and done at a lab in California.
Such experiments are controversial because when cells are extracted from an early-stage human embryo, it destroys the embryo, which some people believe is equivalent to taking a life.
And while the embryos created in these recent experiments may have certain limitations that would prevent them from giving rise to a human clone even if implanted in a womb, that prospect is now scientifically closer.
As with the 2013 experiment, done by researchers at the Oregon Health and Science University, Dr. Lanza and his colleagues first extracted the DNA from an unfertilized human egg and replaced it with the DNA from one of the older donors. The egg automatically “reprogrammed” its DNA until it reached a stage of the embryo known as a blastocyst—a hollow ball of 50 to 100 cells.