Stemagen in La Jolla, California has cloned human embryos by somatic-cell nuclear transfer, publishing the work in the January 2008 issue of Stem Cells. The cloned embryos were grown to the blastocyst stage, although the company failed to generate the sought-after self-propagating stem cell lines needed to develop therapies. Stem cell biologist Stephen Minger from King's College London notes that the work “does help the field a little,” as the company managed to clone human blastocysts with an unusually high efficiency. (Their five successful blastocysts came from 29 donated oocytes, a feat that Stemagen's lead scientist, Andrew French, attributes to the quality of the donated oocytes.) Stemagen plans to build a bank of patient-matched or disease-matched cell lines from which it expects to earn royalties through collaborations with other companies experienced in differentiation and transplantation. In the UK, two institutions have been given the go-ahead to create mixed human-animal embryos for research. On 17 January, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority granted one-year licenses to researchers at King's College London and Newcastle University to transfer the nuclei from adult human cells into an empty cow or rabbit egg. “The reason for using nonhuman eggs is the profound shortage of human eggs,” says Minger, whose team plans to use tissue samples from people with known genetic faults—Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, spinal-muscular atrophy and five other degenerative neurological disorders—to create disease-specific cell lines to try to understand the disease process. LM