Help for Hounds

The unlikely idea that animal and human fat might actually contain useful stem cells was first studied in a lab at the University of Pittsburgh in the late 1990s. Bill Futrell, former chairman of the plastic surgery department at that university, says his group, led by researchers Adam Katz and Ramon Llull, was interested in studying the potential uses of fat when the scientists had a revelation of sorts. "When [my researchers] came to me and told me, 'We can make bone out of fat,' I was excited but naturally skeptical," Futrell tells NEWSWEEK. "The medical dogma for so long had been that liver cells make only liver cells, etc., etc. We were disproving that dogma in our labs. We looked at this again and again and again, and concluded that this was real, and that it could be very useful."

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.

Veterinary experts have been watching Vet-Stem's research with interest. Dr. Beth Sebin, assistant director for education and research at the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), says the organization encourages and supports animal and human studies of this new use of stem cells. "We don't endorse anything specifically, but we do think this is an exciting new area of research, and it does appear to work on animals with osteoarthritis and other joint problems," Sebin says. "There is peer-reviewed scientific literature that lends credibility to what Vet-Stem is doing. They are in the business of making money, of course, so we have to look at them closely. But the basic research seems to back up what they are saying. And it appears that this is all being done in veterinarian clinics in a humane and ethical manner. That's key for us."

As to cost, the procedure for dogs generally runs from $1,500 to $2,500, depending on the animal's overall health. So far Vet-Stem has performed this procedure on only a small handful of cats. "The problem with cats is that they hide their osteoarthritic issues," Harman says. "It's just not as commonly diagnosed." Though the focus is now on canines, the company is researching treatments for cats—especially those with kidney disease, which is a common problem without many solutions. Harman says they plan to start trials next year for feline kidney disease, as well as liver disease in dogs.

As groundbreaking a technology as this appears to be for pets, it could be directly translatable to humans, insists Harman, whose company is exclusively veterinary. "It won't help my business, but I really believe this technology should be fast-tracked for humans," he says.

Tulane's Prockop, who calls Vet-Stem's work with animals "encouraging," advocates a more cautious approach with people. He believes those trials should start with patients who are terminally ill—people who have few other remaining options. "We're still not certain why these cells sometimes work and sometimes don't," he says. "When placed into human tissue, they work kind of like a drug store. But they act differently depending on what type of tissue they are placed in, and we're still learning why that is." Currently, clinical research in the area of fat-derived stem cell use in humans is underway at major institutions such as Tulane, UCLA and the Texas Heart Institute.