Disgraced Korean veterinarian Hwang Woo-suk has teamed up with a Chinese stem cell cluster to build the world's largest animal cloning factory in Tianjin next year.
Some 200 million yuan will be invested in building the plant, which will have facilities to clone cows for meat, racehorses, and sniffer dogs.
The scale of cloning of cattle embryos will eventually rise from 100,000 a year in the early stage to one million, according to Xu Xiaochun, the chairman of BoyaLife.
Hwang’s Sooam Biotech Research Foundation is one of the official partners of the project along with Tianjin International Joint Academy of Biomedicine and Peking University's Institute of Molecular Medicine.
Since Chinese scientists succeeded in cloning an animal for the first time in 2000, several sheep and pigs have been cloned in the country, but the government only permitted cloning for research purposes.
But growing public opinion in favor of commercial animal cloning for food production and protection of endangered species changed things.
In September last year, BoyaLife and Sooam Biotech opened China's first animal cloning company and produced a pure breed of three rare Tibetan mastiffs.
