Wellington clinic uses stem cells to help heal horses

The 1,300-pound patient trembled slightly as an 8-inch needle, carefully placed on the upper rump area, sucked about two ounces of fat tissue from his sleek body.

Its like grating cheese, said a winded Robert Brusie, the staff surgeon at Palm Beach Equine Clinic in Wellington who is performing the medical procedure on a 12-year-old show jumper horse. Racehorses have a lot less body fat, like Olympic swimmers or runners.

Liposuctionfor horses?

Sort of. But its more like regenerative medicine thats helping save careers and even lives.

For the past nine months, to help show horses with slow-healing ligament or tendon injuries, Palm Beach Equine Clinic has been extracting stem cells from fat tissue and injecting those cells back into the horses to repair the injured areas.

Stem cells are simple cells in the body that can develop into various kinds of cells, including blood, skin or intestinal tissues. Stem-cell therapy has had success in treating soft-tissue injuries and arthritis and other joint diseases in horses, degenerative diseases in dogs and such internal medicine problems as kidney disease in cats.

Horses, like the 12-year-old that underwent the 20-minute procedure Tuesday morning, are treated standing up and dont require general anesthesia.

Theyre big animals and getting up and down can be tough for them, said Richard Wheeler, a veterinarian at Palm Beach Equine Clinic. The procedure is not very invasive.

Wheeler said the clinic has performed the procedure on about 20 horses. Before the boom in stem-cell research, veterinarians collected stem cells from the horses bone marrow. It could take a horse a year or several years to recover from an injury, Wheeler said.

Now some are recovering in three months, he added. But since the procedure is still new, Wheeler remains cautiously optimistic.

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Wellington clinic uses stem cells to help heal horses