ohmidog!

A Korean biotech company has announced the birth of another cloned dog — a Pekingese.

It was the first successful cloning of a toy breed.

RNL Bio, a Seoul-based company dedicated to the development of stem cell therapeutics, announced late last week that it successfully produced a clone of a nine-year-old dog named Jasmine for a client in the United States.

“He wanted to continue his love to the clone even if the original Jasmine is healthy,” the company said in a press release.

The tissue from the original Jasmine (above left) was harvested at an animal hospital in Rockville, Maryland and the cells were processed and sent to the firm’s cloning facility in Seoul in November, 2008. The pregnancy was confirmed in mid-December, and a surrogate mother dog gave birth to the puppy on Feb. 1.

After the cloned puppy was weaned from the surrogate’s milk and was confirmed to be in good health, RNL announced the cloning.

“With our proprietary dog cloning technology, any breed can be cloned and there has been no failure in our cloning history,” Dr. Jeong Chan Ra, RNL’s CEO said. “We foresee that cloning demand for both pets and work dogs will increase in the near future.”

The original Jasmine will meet the clone in early April when she is delivered to the U.S. The company claims the first commercial dog cloning in 2008 — five pit bulls cloned from tissue of a California woman’s deceased dog.

RNL produces the clones in conjunction with Seoul National University, which cloned the first dog in the world, Snuppy, in 2005.

The university sold patent rights stemming from Snuppy’s cloning to RNL. A U.S. company, Bio Arts International, is also cloning dogs commercially in conjunction with Hwang Woo-Suk, a former SNU scientist who oversaw Snuppy’s cloning but was later fired for fraudulently reporting research results regarding his work in human embryo stem cells.

Bio Arts claims its patent, stemming from the cloning of Dolly the sheep, gives it the sole right to clone mammals. While Bio Arts says RNL is infringing on its patent, RNL says Bio Arts — through Hwang’s work — is infringing on the Seoul National University patent.

Both companies are continuing to clone dogs for customers, though the dispute is unresolved.