Cloning may sound like a foreign idea to students, but it is a reality on the University’s campus.
Lazaron BioTechnologies, a business within the Louisiana Business and Technology Center, focuses on preserving tissues from animals, said Executive Vice President and Co-Founder Brett Reggio.
The LBTC focuses on helping small businesses access the resources they need to become successful.
“If we have a client interested in banking cells, we have them make an appointment with their veterinarian,” Reggio said. “We send a kit directly to the veterinarian. In this kit, they have everything they need to take a small skin biopsy.”
After the veterinarian takes the skin sample, it is sent immediately back to Lazaron, where they grow cells from the tissue, Reggio said.
“We don’t just freeze it,” Reggio said. “We grow 3 to 4 billion cells from the tissue, which are then stored in liquid nitrogen.”
The cells are sent to the LSU Biotechnology Laboratory, where Richard Denniston, who co-founded Lazaron, is the lab director.
Lazaron provides the starting material for cloning, Reggio said.
Cloning is beneficial for health reasons as well as scientific reasons, Reggio said.
“One chemical can only be found in the human blood supply, and can’t be produced in a lab,” Reggio said. “Goats can now produce it in their milk due to a transfer of genes.”
Another use for cloning can help with human surgery.
With heart surgery, a human heart can be replaced with a pig’s heart. In order to prevent the human from having an immune response attacking the heart, scientists have worked on cloning a pig without that certain gene which causes the reaction, Reggio said.
There have been more than 10 different animals cloned over the years, including goats, cows, horses, and cats. Dogs have yet to be cloned.
“We know hardly anything about the basic reproduction biology of a dog,” Reggio said. “We know that a cow comes into heat every 21 days, and when to transfer an embryo, but in a dog we haven’t done that much work.”
Dogs are rarely studied, as opposed to cows, goats, and especially other farm animals.
Lazaron began after Reggio and co-founder Richard Denniston worked at the Embryo Biotechnology Laboratory together and discovered the use in preserving the cells grown from a dying or deceased animal’s tissue.
Lazaron is one of the leading facilities in the country that focuses on the preservation of cells. According to their Web site, they have been a valuable tool in the development of cloning, which eventually led to the birth of the first transgenic goat.