Kim Williams knew something was wrong with her beloved yellow Labrador retriever. Bart—who is a hunting dog and was accustomed to running for at least an hour a day—was limping from the front shoulder. He’d slowed down considerably.

Bart's arthritis was treated with stem cell therapy.

^{Courtesy photo}

Williams and her husband tried anti-inflammatory medication on Bart. But it would only help temporarily and couldn’t be used long term because it caused stomach problems.

“Bart was so miserable not being able to run,” says Williams. “He would go outside with a soccer ball in his mouth and drop it at your feet. But he was in so much pain.”

The dog was suffering from a disease that affects millions of human beings: arthritis.

Williams took the dog to Nancy Hampel, a veterinarian in El Cajon. Hempel and her husband, veterinarian Richard Johnson, own the Animal Medical Center. Hampel specializes in orthopedics. She suggested to Williams that they try a new procedure, one involving stem cells.

These stem cells aren’t embryonic—which have garnered much controversy over the years—but are taken from adipose (fat) tissue.

Bart had a fat pad taken from his belly one morning and delivered within hours to Bob Harman. His Poway company, Vet-Stem, takes the stem cells out of fat tissue and processes them so they can be injected back into the animal—in Bart’s case, to treat his arthritis.

That afternoon, Williams picked up Bart’s stem cells and took them back to Dr. Hampel, who promptly injected them into the arthritic joint. Arthritis is an inflammation of the joint that often involves a wearing down of cartilage; these stem cells would help Bart’s joint heal and grow more cartilage.

“Within three or four weeks, he was running again,” says Williams. “Just with one treatment, he wasn’t showing any pain. He hasn’t limped since."

It’s been five years since that initial experimental treatment, and only now is Bart starting to show a little pain in that shoulder again. He has four more stem cell doses stored at Vet-Stem that can be used to treat the recurring arthritis.

Williams says she never expected the stem cell therapy to work. “I thought it was voodoo medicine,” she recalls. Besides being new, it’s also not cheap—treatment can run anywhere between $2,000 and $4,000. Yet Williams says now she’s “the biggest proponent of this you’ve ever seen.”

Richard Johnson says in the past five years, he and his wife have treated about 50 animals with stem cell therapy—mostly dogs and most with arthritis—with a positive result in 75 to 85 percent of the cases.

“It’s been incredible,” he says. “We own an American bulldog that had bad hips, elbows and knees, and we were doing surgery to correct the problem, but it wasn’t helping. My wife said, ‘I’m not putting this dog to sleep,’ so instead, we tried stem cell therapy on her. Now she jumps into the car or up on the couch like there’s no tomorrow.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

HARMAN HAS BEEN using stem cell therapy on animals since 2003. Seven years later, Vet-Stem’s revenue is $4 million, and Harmon’s stem cell preparations have been used to treat about 2,500 animals.

Vet-Stem has trained 2,500 veterinarians.

^{Courtesy photo}

Stem cell therapy is at the leading edge of the rapidly growing field of alternative veterinary medicine, which includes chiropractic, acupuncture and aquatic therapies, and even Chinese herbal medicine. About 2,500 veterinarians in the U.S. have been trained to use stem cell therapy through Vet-Stem’s free, online training course. Dogs are by far the biggest recipients of the injections—Harmon estimates some 20 million of them in the U.S. alone suffer from arthritis—but cats and horses have also been treated.

Harmon was a practicing vet in the 1980s when he became acquainted with cell therapy. Back then, he was working mostly with large animals in Southern California, and began consulting for pharmaceutical and biotech companies. He started a business that made a central component for diagnostic kits, like pregnancy tests. One of his clients at the time, Advanced Tissue Sciences, was creating new skin and cartilage.

“I was fascinated by it,” he says, “but as a vet, I thought it was so expensive and complicated it would be decades before anything like it could be brought to veterinary medicine.”

In 1999, at 47, Harmon sold everything and planned on retiring. A year later, while out horseback riding with a former client from Cytori Therapeutics, Harmon was asked his opinion of a stem cell company Cytori had acquired, which was getting its cells from fat tissue.

“They asked me if I would be interested in licensing the technology and using it in veterinary medicine,” says Harmon. “I looked at it, and in five minutes, I could see it would be affordable and effective in veterinary medicine.”

Now he is the only vet in the country to own the global patent rights for use of the technology—stem cells from fat tissue—on animals. “We can license it to others, but we are the gatekeepers,” he says.

Harmon’s therapy involves using an animal’s own stem cells to treat its disease. That means the animal is its own donor (autologous is the scientific term) and the FDA defines that as a service and not a product, which means the agency does not regulate this sort of therapy.

Stem cells from fat tissue are known as mesenchymal stem cells—they can be gotten from a number of different kinds of tissue in addition to fat—and their job is to make connective tissue like tendon and cartilage.

Of all the dogs receiving arthritis therapy from VetStem cell preparations, one-third were able to completely stop pain medication. And 82 percent of the owners surveyed by Harmon said their dog’s quality of life improved; 75 percent had a profound change in the quality, and were generally healthier, he says.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

EVAN SNYDER, DIRECTOR of the program in stem cell and regenerative biology at the Sanford Burnham Medical Research Institute in La Jolla and director of the organization’s Stem Cell Research Center says the ongoing treatment of animals using stem cells could be very valuable for scientists examining ways to use stem cell therapy in humans.

Evan Snyder: The process

could by applied to humans.

^{Photo by Nadia Borowski Scott}

“I think we could learn a lot by having the opportunity to observe these animals with arthritis—in particular aged animals—and see what did this look like before, then after, then two years from now,” says Snyder. “Which ones succeeded, and which didn’t? All this would be instructive in determining how to treat humans.”

If a vet could show that a significant majority of animals treated in this way seemed to have, for example, better mobility and no side effects, “that could be used as evidence with the FDA to try some of the same things in humans,” he says.

It’s not a slam dunk, though. Snyder cautions that it’s certainly not automatic that success in animals with this kind of therapy means success in humans. One problem, he says, is that “cartilage is more than just the cells; it has to form layers to be functioning, and none of the science has been able to form the proper structure of cartilage using mesenchymal stem cells. We have been using embryonic stem cells and have some unpublished data out of the lab that looks promising. So it may or may not work in humans with the mesenchymal cells.”

Still, Harmon believes there is great potential for these cells and great promise for use in humans for diseases where it is being used effectively in animals. Some human patients have already been treated successfully—in clinical trials—for multiple sclerosis with their own mesenchymal stem cells.

In the future, Harmon says, this kind of stem cell therapy will also be able treat animals with liver and kidney disease (kidney failure is a common problem in cats).

“I think it could work the same in humans,” he says. “Look at how many people get hip replacements every year. This is a huge international problem. With this kind of therapy, you might never need to do that. A little liposuction, get your hip injected, and it’s better.”