Chinese firm clones gene-edited dog

Beijing (CNN)With his black, brown and white fur, Longlong looks like most beagles. But the puppy has been sick with a blood-clotting disorder since birth — exactly what scientists in China had wanted.The pup was cloned from Apple, a different dog whose genome was edited to develop the disease atherosclerosis.With that genetic information now coded in, the disease -- a leading cause of strokeand heart sickness -- was passed along to Longlong, who scientists will use to study the condition and its possible cures.Longlong's creator, Beijing-based biotech company Sinogene, said Longlong is the world's first dog cloned from a gene-edited donor. With Longlong's birth, the scientists claimed that China had matched South Korea as a leader in canine cloning technology.South Korean scientists cloned the first dog,an Afghan hound named Snuppy, in 2005."A cloned dog born from a gene-edited cell donor is certainly a breakthrough," says Eugene Redmond, director of Neural Transplantation and Repair at the Yale University School of Medicine, who was not involved in the research.Sinogene have successfully cloned two more puppies in this manner, meaning the company now has four genetically identical puppies -- Apple,Longlong and two new canines, Xixi and Nuonuo."Dogs share the most inheritable diseases with human beings, which makes them the best disease modelsto study," says Feng Chong, technical director at Sinogene.