Question

b. How can therapeutic cloning be used as a source of autologous hESCs for stem cell therapy and why might it be one of the best options for future stem cell therapy programs?

                  c. Do you think that there should be a federal law that bans either therapeutic or reproductive cloning? Substantiate your answer.

Answer 1

In contrast, therapeutic cloning is used to generate only ESC lines whose genetic material is identical to that of its source. These autologous stem cells have the potential to become almost any type of cell in the adult body, and thus would be useful in tissue and organ replacement applications.

Human embryonic stem cells and therapeutic cloning. To repair damaged and diseased cells or tissues, known as stem cell therapy.

The advancement in biotechnologies and stem cell research, although encountering many scientific difficulties, legal constraints and ethical roadblocks, offers a tremendous potential in regenerative medicine and in the treatment of genetic defects. Therapeutic cloning is the transfer of nuclear material isolated from a somatic cell into an enucleated oocyte in the goal of deriving embryonic cell lines with the same genome as the nuclear donor. Somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) products have histological compatibility with the nuclear donor, which circumvents, in clinical applications, the use of immunosuppressive drugs with heavy side-effects. While the goal of reproductive cloning is the creation of a person, the purpose of therapeutic cloning is to generate and direct the differentiation of patient-specific cell lines isolated from an embryo not intended for transfer in utero. Therapeutic cloning, through the production of these autologous nuclear-transfer embryonic stem cells (ntESC), offers great promises for regenerative and reproductive medicine, and in gene therapy, as a vector for gene-delivery. This review focuses on the recent breakthroughs in research based on therapeutic cloning, their feasibility, and their potential applications in medicine. The second part of this review discusses current roadblocks of therapeutic cloning, both in science and biomedical ethics, as well as the main alternatives to therapeutic cloning.