Help for Hounds

Mike Zaremba, an operations manager for a software company in Denver, was desperate and searching. His dog Nakota, a three-year-old Siberian Husky, was in severe and chronic pain and could barely walk after an anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) surgery in February failed to achieve the desired result. The dog would hide in different parts of the house, he always had his head down, and he couldn't walk without limping severely. "The surgery went as well as it could have, so another surgery wasn't an option," says Zaremba. "But Nakota just wasn't healing. He was really suffering. I wanted so badly to help him, but I had run out of options."

When Zaremba's veterinarian told him about a new procedure in which Nakota's own fat-derived stem cells could be used to expedite the ligament's healing, Zaremba was skeptical but willing to try it. Within a few weeks after the minimally invasive procedure, Nakota was back to running long distances and jumping into the car with no visible sign of pain. "He's just like his old self again," Zaremba says. "It's unbelievable."

While humans are still waiting for stem cell treatments to become available, animals like Nakota already have a paw up. Poway, Calif.-based Vet-Stem, which touts itself as 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. This fall veterinarians across the United States will be able to become credentialed users via online training at the company’s Web site.

Robert Harman, the privately held company's CEO and founder, is a veterinarian and former bio-tech executive who says veterinarians have used his company's procedure to treat more than 2,500 horses, including a number of world-class racehorses, and more than 200 dogs with arthritis and tendon and ligament injuries. "The animals return to their prior level of performance about 75 percent of the time," says Harman. "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.

Harvesting stem cells has of course been a tricky and sometimes controversial business, especially from human embryos because of the accompanying moral debate. But with fat-derived (i.e., non-embryonic) cells—from either humans or animals—there is no such debate. And of course there are fewer restrictions and regulations for clinical trials on animals than on humans. With Vet-Stem's procedure, veterinarians collect a small sample (about two tablespoons) of the dog's own fat with a small incision, typically from behind the shoulder blade or from the belly. The fat is then overnighted to Vet-Stem, where the regenerative cells are isolated, and those cells are then overnighted back to the veterinarian in ready-to-inject syringes. The stem cells are then injected straight into the animal's joint or other area of concern.

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.