While humans are still waiting for stem cell treatments to become available, animals like horses and dogs already are getting this opportunity. Poway, Calif.-based Vet-Stem, which is a world leader in veterinary regenerative medicine, has been using its licensed stem cell therapy in horses for three years and is now extending its commercial service to include dogs, who are treated with their own stem cells to repair tendons and ligaments. The first and only company in the United States to offer fat-derived stem cell treatments for commercial use, Vet-Stem has trained 65 board-certified small-animal surgeons to treat osteoarthritis.

“The animals return to their prior level of performance about 75 percent of the time,” says Robert Harman who is a veterinarian and former bio-tech executive. “There’s no question that this is working.” Harman says the only adverse side effects have been swelling at the injection site in a small number of cases.

While proponents of fat-derived stem cell therapy were considered mavericks just a few years ago, Vet-Stem’s results, combined with data from a number of clinical trials worldwide, offer evidence that this is legitimate and promising science. Dr. Darwin Prockop, professor of biochemistry and director of the Center for Gene Therapy at Tulane University Health Sciences Center, has been researching non-embryonic stem cells for the past 14 years. Despite his early skepticism about fat-derived stem cells, he says that the potential uses for these and other non-embryonic stem cells are almost limitless. As Prockop explains it, the body heals itself, but sometimes it can’t do enough. Stem cells boost the body’s healing capability and could potentially be used to treat almost any disease. “These cells repair tissue; they have auto-immune and even anti-inflammatory properties,” says Prockop, who is not affiliated with Vet-Stem.

Research at Pittsburgh (and also at UCLA) eventually led to the creation in 2002 of Vet-Stem by Harman, who had previously run HTI Bio-Services, a company that researched various technologies being developed by biotech companies and helped bring them to market. (UCLA and Pittsburgh have now gone to court over who owns the rights to fat-derived stem cell technology.) After Harman sold the company in 2000, a former client told him about the work of Futrell and his colleagues at Pittsburgh, who had apparently found regenerative stem cells in fat. With some 60 million dogs in this country alone, Harman reasoned that the potential for this technology’s use in veterinary medicine, if it really worked, was staggering.

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