Horsing around with Stem Cells

Seeing as the racehorse industry in Australia lies somewhere near eight billion dollars, it might seem like a good idea to get your hands on a racehorse and get a piece of this. The problem with this seemingly clever idea is that racehorses tend to injure their legs quite a bit- mainly their tendons and ligaments due to their arduous training schedules. In the past, several, usually high-priced, methods were tried in order to get injured horses back in the race as soon as possible. These included anything from surgeries, laser therapies and acupuncture, to things as mundane as rest and antiinflammatory medications. None of these proved to be terribly effective due to the vast amount of scarred tissue that tended to hinder the horse’s movement.

There is now a new hope on the horizon- stem cell therapy. Adult stem cells are totipotent, which means that they have the ability to transform into almost any other cell type (most cells only have one destination). In this case, they could be useful by converting into connective tissues such as those that were initially damaged- tendons or ligaments. In order to achieve this, stem cells are taken from an injured horses fat or marrow, grown in a laboratory, and injected back into that horse. The horse is then rehabilitated (almost) back to its previous condition over a period of about twelve months.

This therapy has not yet been perfected, but looks to be promising in the future. Therapies for osteoarthritis and fractures in horses are also currently being researched, which they hope will one day also help to treat humans with similar conditions.

Written by: Jenny Farrington
Student number: 41180053

References:

Primary:

Wood, R. Spotlight: Stem Cell Therapy in Horses. VetMed Resource (2006)
http://www.cababstractsplus.org/veterinarymedicine/articles.asp?ArticleID=15406&action=display&openMenu=relatedItems&SubjectID=11

Secondary- for interest:

Stem-cell cure for racehorses could be used on athletes
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/10/03/nstem03a.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/10/03/ixhome.html

Stem cells cure tendon damage- scientists get injured equine athletes back on their hooves with pioneering stem cell therapy
http://www.innovations-report.com/html/reports/life_sciences/report-54692.html

Stem Cells in The Spotlight
http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/units/stemcells/