China’s New Cloning Centre to Produce 100K Cattle Embryos a Year

China is planning to build the world’s largest animal cloning centre that will produce one million cattle embryos annually and rapidly improve the quality of livestock, a media report said today.

The $35-million facility will be located in the government sponsored Tianjin Economic and Technological Development Area (TEDA) and will produce dogs, horses, and cattle for food and as well as pets.

China will soon be home to the largest animal cloning facility in the world, where everything from cattle to domestic pets will be factory-engineered starting in 2016.

The use of cloned sniffer dogs has already been established, with South Korea’s customs service deploying the world’s first cloned dogs in 2009.

The factory will include a 15,000-square-meter lab, an animal center, a gene bank and an exhibition hall, according to the Telegraph.

Scientists have cloned mice, cattle and other animals since the world’s first cloned sheep, Dolly, was born on July 5, 1996 in Britain.

The committee has signed a strategic agreement with Yingke Boya Gene Technology (Tianjin) Ltd., a subsidiary of Boyalife Group Ltd, a leading company in stem cell and biological medicine industry in China.

Boyalife chairman Xu Xiaochun said the centre would produce 100,000 cattle embryos a year before expanding annual output to one million.

So far, it has cloned more than 500 working dogs for countries worldwide.

Hwang Woo-suk, the founder of Sooam Biotech, was involved in controversy 10 years ago when he and two chinese research institutions claimed to have cloned human embroyos.

With an investment of 200 million yuan (31 million US dollars), the centre will be jointly built by Sinica, Peking University’s Institute of Molecular Medicine, the Tianjin global Joint Academy of Biomedicine, and the Republic of Korea’s Sooam Biotech Research Foundation.

A joint venture between Sooam and Boyalife started China’s commercial cloning market previous year, Xinhua said, cloning three pure-blooded Tibetan mastiff puppies.