Stem cell treatment for dogs

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 aging,’ says her owner Twila Waters.... 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 an ease in her gait.’