Advanced Cell Technology

Advanced Cell Technology (ACT), a biotechnology company formed in 1994, is involved with therapeutic cloning and the cloning of animals. Among the animals it has cloned are transgenic cows.

ACT's Chief Scientific Officer is Dr. Michael D. West, who also serves as the Chairman of the Board. He is also a former CEO of the firm.

At 7:30 PM on Monday, 8 January 2001, with the birth of a gaur named Noah at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha, Nebraska, ACT became the first biotechnology company to succeed at cloning an animal from an endangered species. Noah was carried and brought successfully by a surrogate mother from another, more common, species, in this case a domestic cow named Bessie. While healthy at birth, Noah died within 48 hours of a common dysentery, likely unrelated to cloning.

In 2001, scientists at ACT cloned the first early (four- to six-cell stage) human embryos for the purpose of generating embryonic stem cells.

ACT received the 2004 Corporate World Technology Award for biotechnology.

On August 23, 2006, the online edition of Nature scientific journal published a letter by Dr. Robert Lanza (ACT's medical director) stating that his team had found a way to extract embryonic stem cells without destroying the actual embryo, deriving a stem cell line using a process similar to preimplantation genetic diagnosis, in which a single blastomere is extracted from a blastocyst. This technical achievement would potentially enable scientists to work with new lines of embryonic stem cells derived using public funding. Federal funding is currently limited to research using embryonic stem cell lines derived prior to August 2001.