The first commercially cloned dog is expected to be born in September -- a pit bull terrier created using cells from the ear tissue of the donor dog, named Booger.

RNL Bio, a company in Seoul, Korea, received its first commercial order in February from a California resident who will pay $150,000 for the cloning.

Company officials have said the owner of Booger -- the dog died, but its tissue was saved -- is a woman whose dog had helped her with a disability.

RNL is one of two biotech companies that have launched dog cloning businesses this year. A California company, BioArts International, also has plans to commercially clone dogs. Both RNL and BioArts use expertise developed at Seoul National University.

In the procedure, cells from Booger will be inserted into ova which are then implanted into surrogate mother dogs.

``The project is doing much better than our initial expectations. Booger (Junior) will be born no later than September,'' Ra Jeong-chan, president of RNL Bio, told The Korea Times Monday.

Ra said he expects the demand for cloning to explode when the market price is lowered to between $20,000 and $30,000. ``We can produce about 30 cloned dogs every year, and we plan to expand the capacity to around 200 soon," Ra said.

It was a team at Seoul National University team, led by Hwang Woo-suk, that produced the world's first cloned dog, Snuppy, in 2005. Hwang was later fired by the university for fabricating and using incorrect data in research papers, but he and his staff continued the dog cloning research at the university and other research institutes.

BioArts, which is acting as a sales agent for Hwang's new team in Seoul, is to auction off five dog cloning slots on June 18 with a starting bid of $100,000.