AGam in Kansas - Dr. Dylan Lutter Discusses Stem Cell Therapy for Equines - August 4, 2016

(Dr. Dylan Lutter) Well, I'm Dylan Lutter. I'm an equine surgeon at the Kansas State College of Veterinary Medicine Teaching Hospital. And I am interested in the effect of mesenchymal stem cells on equine tendon and ligament injury. I'm really excited about this sort of research and clinical application for the potential it brings in improving clinical outcomes with my patients, and really being able to help horses, ultimately, get back into performance and remain sound. I have done this a fair amount. I've been experienced both clinically and in the research field. I did my Master's Degree on looking at the effects of bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells and deep digital flexor tendon injury in horses, and follow that injury out with the use of MRI, actually, to see how those tendons heal. And in addition to that, I've used stem cells in a number of clinical cases in both for tendon and ligament injury and for osteoarthritis. I think the success rate compares very favorably to some of the conventional treatments. I think it's really too early to tell truly how these things are going to affect. But I think right now there's a lot of potential, and that's definitely worth getting excited about and looking into things a lot further. The process I'm most familiar with and currently the one I prefer is you have a horse with a clinical injury, you make the diagnosis, and then draw the bone marrow at that point, send it off for culture. And once the cells are ready for injection, then you either perform the ultrasound-guided injection, or if it is something that requires surgery to fix, then you inject the cells directly at surgery, so either one. Right now we focus on arthritis as the major impact in the equine performance industry, as well as tendon and ligament injury. But certainly there are some clinical evaluations of the effect of laminitis. Fracture healing is starting to come up now from the basic sciences. And so as we get more and more information on how stem cells behave and what the best sources for these are, I think that just the number of diseases where it's applicable are really going to proliferate.