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Research & Industry
Veterinarian uses stem cells to treat spinal cord disease

October 2, 2009 By: Timothy Kirn

For The VIN News Service

With veterinarians across the country training to use stem cells for tendon and ligament repair, a professor at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) wants to take the technology a step further by applying them to chronic, cell-based diseases.

Richard Vulliet, DVM, is very early into the work. But he is optimistic about the evidence as it exists, of course, and he may have had a success.

Vulliet has treated four dogs with degenerative myelopathy with their own stem cells, which he prefers to call mesenchymal stem cells or pluripotent marrow stromal cells. The terminology has evolved and those names are more descriptive, he says.

The process works like this: Vulliet derives the mesenchymal stromal cells from bone marrow. The bone marrow aspirate is then filtered and plated (stromal cells adhere to plastic) because only about one cell in 100,000 is the proper mesenchymal stromal cell. He then cultures the cells into an enriched colony, and injects them back in.

He injects the cells systemically into the circulation because it appears that they home to an area of injury. Moreover, when the cells are injected directly into tissue, they tend to just clump there.

“We’re still in the exploratory phase,” he says. “When I talk to possible clients, I generally get the impression they think I know what I am doing. But no, this is research.”

Vulliet’s potential success is a dog named Turbo, a German Shepherd that belongs to his neighbor. A videotape of Turbo prior to treatment shows the dog trying to walk with little, if any, proprioception in its hind limbs. The dog careens and stumbles and hops to get along. At one point, Turbo falls right into Vulliet, who is holding the dog's leash....

AKC Public Education Lesson Plans

Each lesson plan contains four sections: an objective, a materials list, guidelines for presentation and suggested questions designed to spark discussion with the children. We've also suggested answers to keep discussions on track. Use what works best for you, and feel free to change or adapt any of our suggestions as you see fit.

Click Here For the Public Education Lesson Plans

Do you know the goal of The Humane Society of the United States?

Click Here for HSUS Goals as Written by Nancy G, used with permission
Click Here for the HSUS FAQ

"...the animal rights movement is not concerned about species extinction. An elephant is no more or less important than a cow, just as a dolphin is no more important than a tuna ... In fact, many animal rights advocates would argue that it is better for the chimpanzee to become extinct than to be exploited continually in laboratories, zoos and circuses."
Barbara Biel, The Animals' Agenda, Vol 15 #3.

"It's not about loving animals. It's about fighting injustice. My whole goal is for humans to have as little contact as possible with animals."
Gary Yourofsky, founder of Animals Deserve Adequate Protection Today and Tomorrow (ADAPTT), now employed as PeTA's national lecturer

"We are not especially 'interested in' animals. Neither of us [Peter Singer and Ingrid Newkirk] had ever been inordinately fond of dogs, cats, or horses in the way that many people are. We didn't 'love'animals."
Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: A New Ethic for Our Treatment of Animals, 2nd ed. (New York Review of Books, 1990), Preface, p. ii.

PETA and HSUS have the same agenda, so I will end this with quotes from PETA members and some of their supporters.

Ingrid Newkirk, President of PETA:

"Probably everything we do is a publicity stunt ... we are not here to gather members, to please, to placate, to make friends. We're here to hold the radical line."
USA Today, September 3, 1991

"Pet ownership is and absolutely abysmal situation brought about by human manipulation."
Harpers, August 1, 1988

"In the end, I think it would be lovely if we stopped this whole notion of pets altogether."
Newsday, February 21, 1988

"There is no hidden agenda. If anybody wonders about -- what's this with all these reforms -- you can hear us clearly. Our goal is total animal liberation." "Animal Rights 2002" Convention, June 30, 2002

"I openly hope that it [hoof-and-mouth disease] comes here. It will bring economic harm only for those who profit from giving people heart attacks and giving animals a concentration camp-like existence. It would be good for animals, good for human health and good for the environment."
ABC News interview (April 2, 2001)

"The bottom line is that people don't have the right to manipulate or to breed dogs and cats ... If people want toys, they should buy inanimate objects. If they want companionship, they should seek it with their own kind."
(PeTA), Animals, May/June 1993

"Even if animal tests produced a cure for AIDS, we'd be against it."
Vogue (September 1, 1989)

One day, we would like an end to pet shops and the breeding of animals. [Dogs] would pursue their natural lives in the wild ... they would have full lives, not wasting at home for someone to come home in the evening and pet them and then sit there and watch TV.
The Chicago Daily Herald (March 1, 1990)

"We feel that animals have the same rights as a retarded human child because they are equal mentally in terms of dependence on others."
Alex Pacheco, PeTA Co-Founder, The New York Times (January 14, 1989)

" The cat, like the dog, must disappear... We should cut the domestic cat free from our dominance by neutering, neutering and more neutering, until our pathetic version of the cat ceases to exist."
John Bryant, *Fettered Kingdoms* (PeTA, 1982) p15

"Let us allow the dog to disappear from our brick and concrete jungles -- from our firesides, from the leather nooses and chains by which we enslave it."
John Bryant Fettered Kingdoms: An Examination of a Changing Ethic,p 15

"Liberating our language by eliminating the word 'pet' is the first step... In an ideal society where all exploitation and oppression has been eliminated, it will be NJARA's policy to oppose the keeping of animals as 'pets.'"
New Jersey Animal Rights Alliance, "Should Dogs Be Kept As Pets? NO!" Good Dog! February 1991, p. 20.

"Sometimes I think the only effective method of destroying speciesism would be for each uncaring human to be forced to live the life of a cow on a feedlot, or a monkey in a laboratory, or an elephant in the circus, or a bull in a rodeo, or a mink on a fur farm. Then people would be awakened from their soporific states and finally understand the horror that is inflicted on the animal kingdom by the vilest species to ever roam this planet: the human animal! Deep down, I truly hope that oppression, torture and murder return to each uncaring human tenfold! I hope that fathers accidentally shoot their sons on hunting excursions, while carnivores suffer heart attacks that kill them slowly.
"Every woman ensconced in fur should endure a rape so vicious that it scars them forever. While every man entrenched in fur should suffer an anal raping so horrific that they become disemboweled. Every rodeo cowboy and matador should be gored to death, while circus abusers are trampled by elephants and mauled by tigers. And, lastly, may irony shine its esoteric head in the form of animal researchers catching debilitating diseases and painfully withering away because research dollars that could have been used to treat them was wasted on the barbaric, unscientific practice vivisection."
Gary Yourofsky, PeTAHumane Education Lecturer, quoted in the University of Southern Indiana Student Newspaper, The Shield, January 24, 2008

"I do not believe that it could never be justifiable to experiment on a brain-damaged human. There could conceivably be circumstances in which an experiment on an animal stands to reduce suffering so much that it would be permissible to carry it out even if it involved harm to the animal... [even if] the animal were a human being."
Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: A New Ethic for Our Treatment of Animals, 2nd ed. (New York: New York Review of Books, 1990), p. 85

Animals in Research
Animal testing has been a very controversial topic from the very
beginning. Read on for some pros of animal testing