Copyright 1998 Information Access Company, a Thomson Corporation Company;
                         IAC(SM) Industry Express(SM);
               Copyright 1998 American Health Consultants Inc.  
                                 BIOWORLD Today

                                January 21, 1998

SECTION: VOL. 9; No. 12

LENGTH: 1062 words

HEADLINE: INTERNATIONAL EMBRYO TRANSFER CONFERENCE HERD OF CLONED, TRANSGENIC
COWS SLATED TO EXPRESS HUMAN BLOOD-EXPANDER IN MILK

 BODY:
   By David N. Leff Science Editor                                      
Dolly, meet Charlie and Georgie.

   These two four-footed, twin male newborns are not sheep (Ovis aries)
but cattle (Bos taurus). Nor were they cloned in Scotland, like Dolly, but
in a laboratory at the University of Massachusetts (UMass)-Amherst. of
calves were born, to surrogate mothers, last week on a cattle ranch in
Texas. They went public in Boston Tuesday at the 24th annual three-day
meeting of the International Embryo Transfer Society. 

   Developmental biologist Steven Stice reported to the conference on:
"Cloning and transgenic technologies combined offer new products for the
biomedical and agricultural industries." He is chief scientific officer of
Advanced Cell Technology Inc. (ACT), in Worcester, Mass., and an adjunct
professor at UMass. 

   Stice told the audience how he and his associate, developmental
biologist James Robl, had cloned Charlie and Georgie, using procedures
that differed markedly from technologies employed by the Scottish creators
of Dolly at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh. Robl, a full professor at
UMass, is a cofounderand scientific consultant to ACT, and program
chairman of the Embryo Transfer Society meeting. 

   Comparing the Roslin approach that created Dolly with ACT's methods,
Stice told BioWorld Today, "We think there are at least five or six
differences between what we do and what they do." He counted the ways: 

   "They use quiescent cells, that are not growing, to get closer to
synchrony with the eggs they are putting into the cells. They then fuse
them, and cause them to start developing right from the start.

   "We don't do that. We use cells that are propagating, let them stay in
the egg for a while _ anywhere from two to eight hours _ then start
developing into an embryo at a little later stage." 

   Stice continued: "The eggs we use we collect by the thousand from
slaughterhouse cows. We then mature selected ova to a stage where we can
put them into the cloning process. 

   "Whereas they, at Roslin, go in and superovulate a ewe, get her to a
certain stage, then take the eggs for cloning." 

   Another difference: "We culture our embryos in an incubator, then do a
nonsurgical transfer into a surrogate cow. They are doing surgical
transfers." 

   Stice went on to point out that unlike Roslin's herd of sheep, "We
don't havea herd of cows here in Massachusetts. What we're doing is having
the eggs shipped to us overnight by Federal Express from a Midwestern
slaughterhouse. Then seven days later, after culture, we're shipping
100-to-200-cell embryos to an embryo-transfer company called Ultimate
Genetics Inc., in Franklin, Texas, which puts them into cows the next day.
It's a less expensive way of doing things." 

   Twins One Day, Triplets The Next

   ACT's first two animals, Georgie and Charlie, serve as initial proof-
of-principal models, Stice explained. Those twin male calves became
triplets over the past weekend, with the birth of a third calf, as yet
unnamed. "And a couple more are on the way," Stice said. 

   He cites as twin innovations in the cloning and genetic engineering
technology that he and Robl have now demonstrated, "the first animal
cloned fromsomatic cells in cattle, and the first transgenic in cattle." 

   The time elapsed from getting a fetus from the slaughterhouse,
genetically modifying those cells, confirming that a cell has the gene of
interest in it, then using those in the nuclear transfer procedure, takes
on average three weeks. From there on, it's a matter of nine months'
bovine gestation _ 283 days for females to be born; 285 for males." 

   The next item on ACT's agenda is to raise up a herd of cows carrying
the genefor human serum albumin expressed in their mammary glands, and
recovered from their milk. enzyme," Stice said, "but we have started
work on it, and that work is progressing." This is a collaborative project
with Genzyme Transgenics Corp., of Framingham, Mass., announced in October
last year. 

   Albumin is a high-value protein widely used in blood transfusions
instead of whole blood, Stice explained. "It's the major component, which
maintains the osmotic pressure of the blood vessels." He noted that a
recent press release from Genzyme Transgenics described human serum
albumin as a $ 1.5 billion market, with annual sales of dried plasma
protein at 440 metric tons. 

   "An individual cloned, transgenic dairy cow," Stice pointed out, "is
expectedto produce approximately 80 kilograms of recombinant human albumin
annually." 

   Over the past four years, UMass has applied for several patents
covering the Stice-Robl cloning technology. "Our company started within
the university," Stice said, "and has worldwide exclusive licenses to the
inventions, with royalties, of course."