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BERLIN (Reuters) - Two companies seeking a patent on a process for finding alternatives for organ transplants have apparently abandoned their application, after environmental lobbying group Greenpeace charged last week that they created a "human-pig" hybrid embryo. A spokeswoman for the companies involved confirmed that laboratory cells of human origin were used in the embryo cloning process under dispute. But she denied that what resulted was a human hybrid, saying that Greenpeace had misunderstood the nuclear transfer experiment. Greenpeace's German branch published extracts of what it said was an application made to the European Patent Office in Munich by US-based BioTransplant Inc. and Australian firm Stem Cell Sciences. "The application shows that the firms have already transferred cell nuclei from human fetuses to egg cells from pigs and cultivated the resulting embryos for around a week in the laboratory," Greenpeace said in a statement. "Society should not reward these Frankenstein scientists with patents." A US spokeswoman for both companies said that Greenpeace's interpretation of the experiment was wrong. "A human fetus cell was not used in the experiment," Patricia Dimond told Reuters. "The source of the cell was a laboratory cell line of human origin. It was an aneuploid cell...It was experimentally impossible to create a hybrid pig-human organism." A spokesman for the European Patent Office told Reuters on Friday that "the Office voiced an opinion that certain claims in this application are contrary to morality....As a consequence of this, the applicant did not pursue the application any further." He added that the request would be considered to have lapsed within around 2 weeks if no further action is taken by the applicant. ___________________________________________