Reproductive and therapeutic somatic cell nuclear transplant (SCNT) has been a very controversial topic in its respective realm. The process involves enucleating an oocyte and injecting a healthy nucleus from a somatic donor cell that will then undergo gestation. If it completes gestation then that is a successful reproductive SCNT procedure, and for therapeutic SCNT they will use the pluripotent stem cells from the embryo to use for therapeutic reasons such as tissue repair.
I believe most people have heard of Dolly the sheep who was the first successful clone sing reproductive SCNT that has sparked an interest in furthering this technology/technique. Yes, this was quite the success story, but in reality there's an incredibly low success rate of 1-5% with the addition of various abnormalities within animal trials. This practice would be quite beneficial in bringing back extinct species to help in biodiversity, but it's not an incredibly viable option given the success rate and other complications.
Therapeutic SCNT has more success due to harvesting stem cells at an early embryonic stage so that these pluripotent cells can be used in various ways such as tissue repair. There's been a case of using this practice to help COVID-19 patients by repairing their pulmonary epithelial cells. From this study there were no complications in these patients after a few weeks. Comparatively, there's more hope in therapeutic uses rather than reproductive.
The problems with both of these are obtaining oocytes, compensation for oocytes, no regulation committee (USA), and hesitancy among government leaders to support these practices. Oocytes are incredible hard to obtain due to lack of donors and the potential risk in donating as it's a risky procedure. From there, who and how are you going to compensate a donor for their contribution? There's not enough funding to compensate people what they deserve. Since this is still a developing procedure there's a severe lack of regulation and how these procedures should be regulated. Finally, people and governments aren't very enthusiastic about these procedure due to uncertainty and personal ethical issues with the idea of harvesting cells or creating life that isn't guaranteed to make it to term.
This is a very brief summary into this very fascinating topic that I think everyone should be aware and form an opinion about. I have plenty of sources I can attach for those who want to further investigate this issue.
Citations:
Fulka, J., Jr, Langerova, A., Loi, P., Ptak, G., Albertini, D., & Fulka, H. (2013). The ups and downs of somatic cell nucleus transfer (SCNT) in humans. Journal of assisted reproduction and genetics, 30(8), 1055–1058. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10815-013-0053-7
Gouveia, C., Huyser, C., Egli, D., & Pepper, M. S. (2020). Lessons Learned from Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer. International journal of molecular sciences, 21(7), 2314. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms21072314
Kfoury C. (2007). Therapeutic cloning: promises and issues. McGill journal of medicine : MJM : an international forum for the advancement of medical sciences by students, 10(2), 112–120.
Lo, B., & Parham, L. (2009). Ethical issues in stem cell research. Endocrine reviews, 30(3), 204–213. https://doi.org/10.1210/er.2008-0031
Singh, B., Mal, G., Verma, V., Tiwari, R., Khan, M. I., Mohapatra, R. K., Mitra, S., Alyami, S. A., Emran, T. B., Dhama, K., & Moni, M. A. (2021). Stem cell therapies and benefaction of somatic cell nuclear transfer cloning in COVID-19 era. Stem cell research & therapy, 12(1), 283. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13287-021-02334-5
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