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EQUINE HEALTH
“All cells in the body become damaged as we get older. They age, so even if you have a healthy, normal animal, there are many stringent requirements for donor testing. Cells from an adult will be different.” – Dr. Thomas Koch
horse comfortable. “It might only have to be every 6 months or every 8 months or even longer. It might depend on the horse; there may be some horses that don’t respond to the treatment. But for horses that do respond, we may be able to manage their disease more consistently and have some degree of joint preservation—and disease arrest,” he says. This could be potentially career-extending, for some horses.
“There is some interesting data now, both in veterinary medicine and human medi- cine, and the fact that there are two products approved in Europe is exciting. Our company, eQcell, is trying to do something similar with products that are currently available. We have trials starting in the U.S. at UC-Davis. The lead investigator there is Dr. Larry Galuppo. The trial at the Ontario Veterinary College in Canada is led by Dr. Judith Koenig (Equine Sports Medicine & Reproduction Centre). Both trials have approval—from Health Canada and from the FDA—since stem cells are regulated because they are considered drugs,” says Koch.
This is the reason there are no approved stem cell products currently available in North
America. Other regenerative therapies like IRAP and PRP fall under the FDA’s category of devises rather than drugs. “There is a
very big difference between getting a device approved by FDA and getting a drug approved. It is very expensive and time-consuming to get a drug approved, and this is a big impediment for veterinary medicine, because from a phar- maceutical perspective it is still a very small market,” he explains.
“When companies look at the market and the cost of getting a product developed and approved, it becomes difficult to make a finan- cial case for it, even for products that would greatly benefit the horse,” he says.
“Our company will be pursuing the European market prior to the North American market because there is already
a precedent in Europe (with two products approved) that we can follow, and the likeli- hood of getting approval is higher. So we hope to get into Europe first and then continue
our animal studies to get approval in North America. Equine veterinarians in North America would like to get access to some of the products in Europe. They are looking for alternatives for managing synovitis and early
OA; there is still an unmet need and a desire to try these new products.”
The stem cell product that eQcell will be marketing will be allogeneic cells (from other horses rather than from the patient’s own body). “There are obvious advantages in using autologous cells from the patient; there are no concerns about immune recognition (and rejec- tion of the cells). We do provide that service to equine veterinarians and have been doing that for the past 10 years. They take a bone marrow aspirate from the patient, ship it to us, and we isolate the cells from that—and ship it back two weeks later. This is just a small service business, however,” he says. It can’t help as many horses.
“Some veterinarians are also not comfortable taking a bone marrow aspirate to send to us.
It’s also inconvenient for the horse owner and veterinarian because the horse has to come back two weeks later for treatment. This adds cost, and you are not in control of treatment timing; you are hostage to the laboratory schedule.”
By contrast, if you can use a product off the shelf, it can be given to the horse at the desired time of treatment, when you think treatment will be most helpful. “If the veterinarian diagnoses the horse and thinks it could benefit from stem cells, and has those cells in the clinic, it can be done right away. If it’s a referral hospital, sometime those horses are brought from far away. It’s not very convenient to have them come back later, with another long trip. This is partly why use of allogeneic cells is becoming more popular; they are much more convenient,” says Koch.
HOW THE CELLS ARE HARVESTED AND GROWN
“The cells we are working with are from the umbilical cord blood of newborn foals. When I did my PhD work, I reported on the presence of these cells. This had been reported previously in humans, but we were the first to investigate whether we could find similar cells in equine umbilical cord blood, and we did. We gave that report in 2007,” he says.
“I finished my PhD and continued to work on these cells. Our company gets the cells from umbilical cord blood. Most other people get
it from bone marrow or fat tissue. In Europe, one product (HorStem) contains cells from the umbilical cord tissue (not the blood) and the
Culture media change on equine mesenchymal stomal cells during laboratory expansion.
106 SPEEDHORSE March 2022
Photo by Dr. Erin Roberts, University of Calgary