Cancer-sniffing dog being cloned in SKorea

SEOUL (AFP) - A Japanese centre which says it has trained a dog to sniff out human cancer cells is cloning the animal in South Korea, a Seoul bio-technology company and the dog's owner said Wednesday.

Cloned foetuses from the black labrador retriever named Marine were last month implanted into a surrogate mother dog, said Ra Jeong-Chan, president of RNL Bio.

"We are going to see the clones around the end of this month," Ra told AFP.

Marine, who is six and half years old, lost her ability to reproduce when she had her womb removed because of disease.

She is owned by Yuji Satoh, a head trainer at St. Sugar Cancer Sniffing Dog Training Centre located at Shirahama in Chiba prefecture.