Snuppy

First cloned dog

Snuppy (Korean: 스너피 a portmanteau of "SNU" and "puppy"; April 24, 2005 – May 2015) was an Afghan hound, the first dog clone. The puppy was created using a cell from an ear from an adult Afghan hound and involved 123 surrogate mothers, of which only two produced pups (Snuppy being the sole survivor). The Department of Theriogenology and Biotechnology at Seoul National University, which cloned Snuppy, was led by Woo Suk Hwang. Snuppy has since been used in the first known successful breeding between cloned canines after his sperm was used to artificially inseminate two cloned females, which resulted in the birth of 10 puppies in 2008. In 2017, 4 clones of Snuppy were made by Sooam, and were the first clones made of a cloned dog, to investigate potential health effects of cloning.

After Dolly the sheep was cloned in 1996, scientists had managed to clone numerous other animals, including cats, cows, gaur, horses, mice, mules, pigs, rabbits and rats but had been unsuccessful in cloning a dog due to the problematic task of maturing a canine ovum in an artificial environment. 123 surrogate mothers were used to carry the embryos, of which 1,095 were implanted, the procedure resulted in only three pregnancies; one resulted in a miscarriage, the other pup was born successfully but died of pneumonia three weeks after birth, the successful clone was carried by a Labrador Retriever.

As the eggs in a female canine are only fertile during the estrus phase of the estrous cycle, the eggs could only be harvested during a three week period each year. Due to complexities with removing eggs from canine ovaries the eggs had to be extracted from the oviduct, which required constant monitoring to achieve. The nucleus of each egg was replaced with the cell from the ear of the adult dog and then electrified and fused using a chemical reaction. The embryos were then transferred to the surrogate dogs. Three of the surrogate mothers became pregnant and two gave birth. Snuppy, the first to be born, survived while the other died two weeks after birth.

Snuppy was named as Time Magazine's "Most Amazing Invention" of the year in 2005. The experiment was criticized by Robert Klitzman, director of Columbia University's Masters in Bioethics program, who said that the process raised the question of whether humans are "just a mass of cells and biological processes?" This brought serious doubts about the validity of Snuppy, which Hwang consistently claimed was a genuine clone. Hwang hired HumanPass Inc., a Korean DNA lab to investigate Snuppy, who found that Snuppy was authentic. The findings by HumanPass were dismissed on the grounds that they were employed by Hwang, and a panel at the Seoul National University ordered their own investigation. The investigation found that, despite his fabrications in previous projects, Hwang's research related to Snuppy was accurate and Snuppy was a clone of the adult Afghan hound. As a result of his forgeries, Hwang was indicted for fraud and dismissed from the university.

Veterinary professor Byeong Chun Lee took over leadership of the team behind Snuppy. In 2008, Snuppy became involved in the first known successful breeding between cloned canines, after sperm taken from Snuppy was used to artificially inseminate two cloned females, which resulted in the birth of 10 puppies. Nine of the puppies survived. The SNU team, under Lee, have gone on to clone over 30 dogs and five wolves. SNU, which claimed to own the patent for the process used to clone Snuppy, formed a license agreement with RNL Bio, a commercial pet cloning company. Hwang entered into a partnership with RNL Bio's competitor, BioArts International, which caused an ongoing legal battle into who owns the patent rights although Bio Arts withdrew from dog cloning in 2009. RNL completed the first commercial cloning in August 2008 but ran into financial trouble in 2013. The world's first cloned sniffer dogs (all of which are named Toppy) were put to work by South Korean customs in July 2009. Supporters of Hwang founded a company called Sooam Biotech where Hwang developed proprietary techniques based on a licence from ViaGen's subsidiary Start Licensing (which owns the original Dolly patent) and created cloned dogs for owners whose dogs had died, charging $100,000 a time and to be producing 500 cloned embryos of various species a day in 2016.

Snuppy died in May 2015 at the age of 10.