Stem-Cell Treatments for Pets
Stem-Cell Treatments for Pets
Wednesday, Jun. 25, 2008 By JENINNE LEE-ST. JOHN
Blue leads an active lifestyle: she runs four times a week around an
enormous park in her hometown of Memphis, Tenn.; she likes playing
Frisbee and loves swimming. But one day last November, Blue started
limping — which was odd because the German shepherd seemed fit and was
only 3 1/2 years old. "She wasn't recovering as quickly as normal from
a trek in the park. I thought that was just a sign of ageing," says her
owner Twila Waters, 43, with a wry chuckle.
In fact, Blue had hip dysplasia, a fairly common and sometimes
crippling degenerative condition in dogs and cats. The cure — a
complete hip replacement — would keep Blue in recovery for up to six
months. So while Waters mulled the surgery, Blue's regular
veterinarian sent Waters to see another local vet, Kathy Mitchener,
who was trained in acupuncture, to treat Blue's pain. But Mitchener
had a better idea. She offered a cutting-edge stem-cell transplant, a
therapy not yet available to humans, that would potentially help
Blue's hip repair itself.
The treatment took just two days last January. Mitchener had recently
become certified to perform the stem-cell treatment, pioneered by the
company Vet-Stem based in San Diego. She removed some fatty tissue
from the dog's abdomen and shipped the sample to Vet-Stem's labs,
where technicians used centrifuges to extract stem cells from the
tissue. The cells were shipped back the next day, and Mitchener
injected them into Blue's failing hip, where they adapted and
developed into the healthy cartilage and tendon cells the animal
needed. Within 36 hours, Waters says, "Blue was moving well, and you
could see ease in her gait." Vet-Stem kept a frozen store of Blue's
stem cells, in case she suffers a relapse or has another orthopaedic
injury, but for now, Blue is fully cured and back to running and
swimming and playing with her friends.
Vet-Stem's therapy is just the newest frontier in the booming field of
alternative veterinary medicine — which includes acupuncture,
chiropractic and aquatic therapies and traditional Chinese herbal
medicine — an industry driven by pet owners who are increasingly
willing to do or pay whatever they can to help their ailing pets. In
the past decade, the number of vets who completed a 156-hr. training
course is given by the International Veterinary Acupuncture Society
(IVAS) has quadrupled. IVAS also recently added courses in herbal and
food therapy, and Tui Na, a manipulative treatment like chiropractic.
According to IVAS spokeswoman Vikki Weber, 10% to 20% of the society's
trainees end up quitting Western medicine altogether. "There are other
possibilities out there besides pills or a doctor's knife," says
Mitchener, a veterinary oncologist who incorporated alternative
treatments into her practise four years ago.
Most progressive veterinary therapies are inspired by human health
care. Burton Miller, who runs the Animal Wellness Center in Huntington
Station, N.Y., became a practitioner of Eastern medicine for animals
after suffering a skiing accident in 1996. He began reading up on
alternative therapies for his injury and decided to apply the same
kind of medicine to his animal patients. "I announced to my [clients]
that everything I had ever told them was wrong," he says. Those pet
owners promptly abandoned him, but today he has a thriving practice in
which acupuncture and homoeopathic medicines are the most common
courses of treatment. (A veterinary visit including acupuncture with
Miller costs $65 — about what a human acupuncturist in Manhattan charges.)
Unlike these older, more popular therapies, Vet-Stem offers — for the
time being — better medicine to animals than any allowed for their
owners: even though it does not use controversial embryonic stem
cells, the fatty-tissue stem-cell transplant has not yet secured FDA
approval for use in humans. But pets are reaping the benefits in
droves. Since Vet-Stem began offering its online certification course
in January, more than 1,000 vets have signed up to take it, many at
the urging of their patients' owners. The FDA has so far approved the
treatment for animals' orthopaedic problems in tendons and ligaments,
and for bone fractures and arthritis. Vet-Stem says that some of its
patients begin to feel better the same day, and most improve within a
week. About 20% see no progress at all, but the company hasn't
received reports of negative effects and it says it didn't see any in
its earlier clinical trials. Vet-Stem is now testing stem cells to
treat kidney disease in cats and liver disease in dogs.
The cure-all doesn't come cheap. A cycle of stem-cell treatment
generally costs $2,000 to $4,000, including the extraction, surgeries
and follow-up. (Canine hip-replacement surgeries, however, can be
about four times as expensive.) Robert Harman, Vet-Stem's founder,
says that because of the steep price tag, he initially thought wealthy
horse owners would be his primary clientele. "Turns out there's not
quite the same emotional attachment to horses as in the small-animal
world," Harman says. "It used to be if your dog got sick, you just got
a new dog. Now people want the best care, and they want to pay for
it." At the start of the year, Vet-Stem's patient pool was 90% horses
and 10% dogs. By the end of 2008, Harman estimates those numbers will
shift to 60% dogs, 10% cats and 30% horses — no doubt aided by
word-of-mouth praise from pet owners like Waters. "It's comforting for
me to know I've done what I can to alleviate Blue's pain," Waters
says. "She loves to play so much that fixing her hip really improved
both our qualities of life."