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Articles
Thoroughbred Times
Veterinary Spotlight: How a pig can help a horse Tissue grafts from pig bladders support growth of new cells and help accelerate healing
by Denise Steffanus
THE HUMAN fields of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine are being employed to mend hard-to-heal wounds in horses. Urinary bladders of pigs certified to be free from specific pathogens (pleuropneumonia, mycoplasma, atrophic rhinitis, lice, mange, and dysentery) are harvested when the pigs are slaughtered, and this tissue becomes the scaffold for regrowth of tissue when it is applied to an injury.
Called extracellular matrix (ECM) technology, the procedure has been used successfully in small animal medicine and is now gaining acceptance in equine practice. Horses with degloving injuries, in which the hide is pulled off a limb, especially benefit from this technology, as do horses with burns, corneal ulcers, and lacerations. Research is under way to use a powdered form of ECM injected into lesions to treat bowed tendons, pulled suspensory ligaments, and fractures. A proposal is on the table with leading researchers into equine joint disease to determine if ECM will facilitate cartilage repair.
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Horse Care
For many years, researchers have been looking for the signals the body uses to start the healing process when an injury occurs. When the body suffers an injury (a skin or muscle wound, pulled tendon, injured joint or broken bone, for instance), the body has to ecognize the injury and then go through a series of processes to deal with it and heal. Some of the factors involved in healing include stem cells and growth factors. Insulin-like growth factor (IGF), for example, is one of the important signals in turning on certain processes within the body.
For a long time, researchers thought that the important body processes occur within the cells and that the gridwork surrounding the cells was fairly inert. Then they discovered that this three-dimensional structure outside cell walls (the matrix or scaffolding that holds cells in place) is actually a very important information highway, containing many chemicals (including growth factors) that act as mediators or messengers to tell the body what to do. A few years ago, two researchers (a veterinarian and a physician from Harvard) were able to isolate some of these factors. They found a way to extract the extra-cellular matrix and create a product they named ACell (which means not cell) that can be used as an aid in tissue healing, and started a company to produce this product.
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A-Cell Therapy Offers Renewed Hope For Horses Incurring Tendon And Ligament Injuries
It’s hard to imagine that cells from pig bladders could be useful for healing injured horses—but, it’s true.
“The beauty of A-cell therapy is its simplicity; you merely reconstitute the product from a little bottle and put it in the horse’s leg,” said Rick Mitchell DVM, of Fairfield Equine Associates in Newtown, Conn., a staunch believer in the therapy.
This image almost sounds too good to be true. But so far veterinarians who’ve been using this therapy for the past few years to treat injured ligaments and tendons have found that A-cell is a bonafide therapy that aids the horse’s own body in the healing process.
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