Stem-cell therapy helps animals heal

Eddie was injured in the line of duty.

While trying to heed his partner's call, he fell through a second-story window at a training center for the Oregon Police Academy.

The initial prognosis wasn't good. Eddie's broken ankle had to be surgically fused. Ligaments and tendons in his wrist were torn.

"There was just too much damage for him to keep working," said Eddie's partner, Shawn Gore, a Portland police officer. It was only a matter of time before arthritis crippled him.

"In earlier days, yeah, probably he would have been put down," Gore said of the 3-year-old Belgian Malinois.

But these are not earlier days. Man's best friend is benefiting from stem-cell therapy. Procedures that began experimentally with horses four years ago were expanded to dogs and cats in May. Treatment for people could come later.

Eddie is being treated with a new procedure that uses adult stem cells harvested from his body fat. The cells are isolated and strengthened, then injected into the damaged area.

Tendons torn from bones often grow new connections. Torn ligaments that once could be treated only with pain medicine now can mend. (A dog's ankle, or hock, is a joint in the rear leg; the canine wrist, or carpals, is in the front leg.)

"It's a quality-of-life thing," said Julie Ryan Johnson, a veterinarian with Vet-Stem, a Poway, Calif., company that processes fat sent by veterinarians from around the country. Vet-Stem then returns ready-to-inject syringes of stem cells for therapy.

Johnson said stem cells seem to deal with injuries in two ways: They seem to trigger other cells to go to the injured area and help heal it. Stem cells also have the ability to transform themselves into whatever tissue is needed at an injured site.

Stem cells are part of the body's repair system and are able to divide without limit to replenish other cells as long as the person or animal is alive, according to the National Institutes of Health. New cells can remain stem cells or become different cells with specialized functions, such as muscle cells, tendon cells or ligament cells.

Stem cells won't grow a new limb that is amputated or so badly damaged it's lost, Johnson said. But stem cells can be remarkably effective in treating common canine maladies.

The use of embryonic stem cells to treat human disease is controversial. The therapy used to help Eddie and other dogs uses adult stem cells, which occur naturally in the dog's body fat, not embryonic stem cells.