Tom Brady Reveals New Dog Cloned from Dead Pet

This week former NFL quarterback Tom Brady announced that his pitbull mix called Junie is a clone of his late dog, Lua. The Fox football analyst had shared Lua, who died in 2023, with ex-wife Gisele Bündchen and their children.

Brady shared the details of the cloning in a news release issued by Colossal Biosciences, which has just acquired biotech firm Viagen, the company that owns the rights to the technology used to clone Dolly the sheep in 1996. 

Gisele Bündchen via Instagram

“I love my animals. They mean the world to me and my family,” the former NFL star (and investor in Colossal) said. “A few years ago, I worked with Colossal and leveraged their non-invasive cloning technology through a simple blood draw of our family's elderly dog before she passed.”

The Dallas-based Colossal Biosciences is the company behind bringing the extinct dire wolf back into the world. Its new acquisition Viagen has been in the pet-cloning business for a few years, including duplication work it did for Barbra Streisand and her late Coton de Tulear, Samantha.

Bündchen and Brady had adopted Lua during their marriage, which ended in 2022. The footballer and the model regularly shared pics of the pet on social media; Lua even appeared in a commercial with Brady, a 2014 Ugg Australia ad.

Not everyone is pleased with the brave new technology. “Cloning is a horror show: a waste of lives, time and money,” fumed PETA’s senior vice president, Kathy Guillermo, when Streisand’s  lab-made dogs were in the news. “The suffering that such experiments cause is unimaginable.”

It costs $1,600 to extract and preserve a pet’s genetics, according to Viagen’s website, and another $50,000 to clone a dog or cat. If you’re not a football star or a supermodel, it’s rather cheaper to adopt.

Photo credit: Tom Brady via Instagram