BioArts and Sooam decided to partner to offer a limited number of cloning spots to the public through a program called "Best Friends Again" in 2008. In 2009, Lou Hawthorne the CEO of BioArts announced he was withdrawing from the program due to the small market, unethical competition, weak intellectual property protection, unscalable bioethics and unpredictable results. However Sooam Biotech continued developing proprietary techniques based on a licence from ViaGen's subsidiary Start Licensing (which owns the original Dolly patent) and continued creating cloned dogs for owners whose dogs had died, charging $100,000 a time. Sooam Biotech was reported to have cloned 700 dogs by 2015, a cloning success rate of 40% and to be producing 500 cloned embryos of various species a day in 2016.