A Californian company says it has brought human cloning research to a new level with the efficient production of five cloned early-stage human embryos called blastocysts from adult skin cells.

Stemagen, which is based in La Jolla, hopes that its achievement will lead to the use of cloning techniques for biomedical research and, potentially, therapy. But first it will need to go the next step ? using cells from a patient to generate blastocysts and then establish self-propagating lines of embryonic stem cells that, as clones, would be genetically identical to the patient.

Cloned human blastocysts have been reported before, but previously they have been made from human embryonic stem cells. The findings were reported last week in Stem Cells (A. French et al. Stem Cells doi:10.1634/stemcells.2007-0252; 2008).