NewsWatch: 2009: Stem Cells

[Narrator:] From the University of California at Davis, this is NewsWatch.

[Paul Pfotenhauer:] With the cut of the ribbon, UC Davis opened its newest veterinary medical laboratory, designed to provide stem cells to horses to treat bone, tendon and ligament injuries.

[Paul Pfotenhauer:] Thousands of horses suffer these kinds of injuries every year.

[Sean Owens, UC Davis Dir., Regenerative Medicine:] If you go across the spectrum of horses it is probably the number one training related and use related injury that horse owners see.

[Paul Pfotenhauer:] In the past, treatment consisted of rest and lots of anti-inflammatory drugs. Now, with the use of stem cells, the goal is to regenerate healthy tissues so the animal can be as sound as it was before the injury.

[Gregory Ferraro, UC Davis Dir., Center for Equine Health:] The difference is we were able to heal tendons before. But we healed them with a scar…scar tissue. What we are doing with stem cells is healing that tissue with its own natural…with tendon tissue, with natural tissue. So we are recreating the damage tissue in a natural way — that's the big difference.

[Julie Burges, UC Davis Stem Cell Lab Technician:] Clients will usually pull bone marrow and collect it a bag for us and once they send it to us we put it into a system called AXP which isolates the stem cells. Once those stem cells are isolated we give them to the regenerative medicine lab techs and they then culture and process them.

[Sean Owens:] If stem cells offer perhaps one tenth of the promise that we hope they do for both us and human researchers hope that they do, it may be akin to the discovery of penicillin.

[Paul Pfotenhauer:] Stem cell procedures may soon be available to dogs. Paul Pfotenhauer, reporting from UC Davis.

[Narrator:] For more information please log on to broadcast.ucdavis.edu.