investigation found that, despite his fabrications in previous projects, Hwang's research related to Snuppy was accurate and Snuppy was a clone of the adult Afghan hound. As a result of his forgeries, Hwang was indicted for fraud and dismissed from the university. Developments Veterinary professor Byeong Chun Lee took over leadership of the team behind Snuppy. In 2008, Snuppy became involved in the first known successful breeding between cloned canines, after sperm taken from Snuppy was used to artificially inseminate two cloned females, which resulted in the birth of 10 puppies. Nine of the puppies survived. The SNU team, under Lee, have gone on to clone over 30 dogs and five wolves. SNU, which claimed to own the patent for the process used to clone Snuppy, formed a license agreement with RNL Bio, a commercial pet cloning company. Hwang entered into a partnership with RNL Bio's competitor, BioArts International, which caused an ongoing legal battle into who owns the patent rights although Bio Arts withdrew from dog cloning in 2009. RNL completed the first commercial cloning in August 2008 but ran into financial trouble in 2013. The world's first cloned sniffer dogs (all of which are named Toppy) were put to work by South Korean customs in July 2009. Supporters of Hwang founded a company called Sooam Biotech where Hwang developed proprietary techniques based on a licence from ViaGen's subsidiary Start Licensing (which owns the original Dolly patent) and created cloned dogs for owners whose dogs had died, charging $100,000 a time Sooam Biotech was reported to have cloned 700 dogs by 2015 and to be producing 500 cloned embryos of various species a day in 2016. Death Snuppy died in May 2015 at the age of 10. See also List of individual dogs References 2005 animal births 2015 animal deaths Cloned dogs Dog breeding Science and technology in South Korea Individual animals in South Korea