Jennifer Nagashima and the first litter of puppies born by in-vitro fertilization

ITHACA, N.Y. — The world’s first puppies have been conceived using in-vitro fertilization — the same test-tube method that leads to the births of tens of thousands of human babies every year.

The idea isn’t to get more puppies. It’s to be able to genetically manipulate puppies, removing disease-causing genes, for instance, and perhaps to someday help save endangered canine species, the team at Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine said.

The idea isn’t to get more puppies. It’s to be able to genetically manipulate puppies, removing disease-causing genes, for instance, and perhaps to someday help save endangered canine species, the team at Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine said.

“There’s currently five species of dog that are threatened with extinction,” he said. They include the red wolf, the African painted dog, and the Ethiopian wolf.

“So by doing this now in a domestic dog, what we’re doing is creating a platform or starting place to now expand this technique to be used for all these other species of dog. It may not turn out to be exactly the same, but it gives us a really good starting point,” Travis told NBC News.

Researchers also can use the method to correct genetic diseases that plague many breeds of dog.

“In-vitro fertilzation itself can’t help prevent disease but what it does is it gives us a way to generate embryos and then we can use new technologies – gene editing technologies – to hopefully go in and fix uh certain genes that cause those diseases,” Travis said.