Exciting news from the recently opened Regenerative Medicine Laboratory at UC- Davis. Doctors there have been able to help horses heal life-threatening injuries with stem cell technology.
"For some time we've been trying to figure out a way to do something other than make a better scar," said Dr. Sean Owens, the director of the facility. They are using stem cells, harvested from the bone marrow, umbilical cord blood or placental tissue, to mend bones and soft tissues in horse with astounding results. "This is not drug-based therapy," adds Dr. Gregory Ferraro, the university's director for equine health. "We're talking about biological medicine. So we are recreating natural tissue with cells. It has the real promise of cure."
So real in fact that Ferraro believes, the technology, which did not exist at the time of his injury, could have been used to improve Barbaro's chances of recovery. "The team at the University of Pennsylvania did a wonderful job with Barbaro," he comments. "The problem was that the recovery was so long, it gave laminitis a chance to set in to the opposite foot. A much shorter recovery time would have lessened the chance of laminitis and made his survival chances much better."
To date, nine of Dick Randall's reining horses have been treated with stem cells for injuries and all returned to training, usually in 90 days. He is one of the funders of the new lab. A collection kit has been developed so that vets and farm managers can provide bone marrow samples directly to UC-Davis where researchers can produce stem cell therapy doses in about two weeks.
"The application of stem cell science to treating horses is advancing so quickly that within three to fie years, the treatments that are currently being provided for orthopedic repair in athletic horses will seem crude in hindsight," notes Ferraro.
Just think what the future holds for humans!
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