Plans are under way to set up an international consortium on the mainland to develop the use of cloned animals to treat degenerative diseases, according to an American-Chinese biologist who cloned the first dairy cow in the US.
Jerry Yang Xiangzhong, professor and director of the Centre for Regenerative Biology at the University of Connecticut, said he believed the mainland could be a leading centre for cloning techniques because the industry had both legal and financial backing from the central government.
'Its focus will be therapeutic cloning - meaning one day we want to have a cure for human diseases that have no cure,' he said.
These include Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's, diabetes, skeleto-muscular dystrophy, and cancer.
'I want to use cloning technology for human medicine, meaning taking your cells to convert to any cells that have died, aged or mutated,' he said. 'It will help in the future for China to play a critical and leading role in biomedicine research.'
Professor Yang, 47, who presented a paper on cloning therapy at an international biomedical forum jointly organised by Harvard Medical School, the University of Hong Kong and Nature Publishing Group, left yesterday for Shanghai and Beijing to discuss the funding and siting of an international consortium on the mainland that will further develop the use of therapeutic cloning.