Chapter 8 - Stem Cells in Veterinary Medicine

Abstract

Animals have many of the same ailments and injuries as people so that stem cells could, in principle, also be used to treat animals with damaged tissues and organs. In fact, the potential effectiveness of most stem cell therapies is actually pretested in animals and these studies can therefore be useful for obtaining more fundamental information on animal development, differentiation of animal cells to different tissue types, and development of disease. It is hoped that this will lead to the development of new drugs and therapies for veterinary medicine, particularly for valuable show or breeding stock. In addition, pet animals such as dogs and rabbits can be extremely important as preclinical models for human medicine, in some cases actually serving this purpose better than standard laboratory animals (e.g., mice and rats). Human medical conditions, such as heart disease, are often recapitulated more accurately in larger species than in small rodents. In light of this, one might expect that progress in the veterinary field would be substantially advanced than in human medicine, but actually the opposite is true.