Hi there this is Krista with Episode #138 on the Wag Out Loud pawdcast. Because I'm going to be expanding my Wag Out Loud business with exciting things in store, I wanted to let you know that as of January 2022, I will go from releasing weekly episodes to releasing bi monthly episodes. Putting this show on is very important to me, but to do it right, and all on my own, I've decided to bring you the same awesome guests and content, but just with lesser frequency. That will give me more time to work on other fantastic projects in the canine health and wellness space. So stay tuned for some exciting future announcements. Did you know that dog owners are 15 to 36% less likely to die from a heart related event than non dog owners? Welcome to the Wag Out Loud pawdcast, where we are obsessed with bringing you helpful tips on canine health care, nutrition, and overall wellbeing. If you'd like to support the show, check out the amazing online events, products and resources that I personally recommend on the Wag Out Loud website. I'm your host, Krista and I'm super excited to be bringing you yet another tail wagging episode. Hello dog lovers, and thanks for joining us and for being an advocate for your dog's health. Today, I'm joined by Dr. Mike Hutchinson. And he is going to share the emerging science and technology using stem cells in our dogs. So this is going to be fascinating. Dr. Mike, I have been looking forward to this, it seems like forever ago that we met. We're all going to learn more about this amazing field of medicine. So can you please introduce yourself and tell us what got you interested in the science of stem cell therapy? Well, absolutely, and thanks for that kind introduction Krista. So I've been a veterinarian 35 years. I graduated from Iowa State Veterinary College in 1986. And in about 2000, I started reading about stem cells, these repair cells that are in our body. And honestly, I thought it was Sci Fi Krista. I didn't think this was something I would ever be privileged to do in my lifetime. You know, this is a kind of thing you prayed, your children would see one day. And then in 2007-2008, I got introduced to veterinary medicine, started out primarily in horses and then graduated into the dogs and cats. And since then I have been blessed with treating approximately 2000 cases, I've traveled all over the world to speak about stem cells, and to humans to veterinarians, to colleagues, lay people. And I feel like I waited 25 years of my career, just to be able to use stem cells. And once you get exposed to them, it's so exciting because we're using the regenerative ability of the body is that's what stem cells are is repair cells. Every tissue in your body contains repair cells. And we're trying to collect them, put them into a little micro environment or damaged area, like a joint or somewhere a bone or ligament and seeing if we can help start the repair process, maybe even regenerate some cartilage, but certainly reduce pain, reduce inflammation, calm down the immune system if it's overreacting, and that just improves their quality of life. So that's why I get so excited about it and love to talk about it. And you can't shut me up and say it just one of those passions of mine now. And like I said, I've been blessed to be able to do this. And I love sharing this information. I don't blame you for being so excited. This just is amazing. So is stem cell therapy pretty common in veterinary medicine? Or is it still pretty new? They you know what happens? They don't teach it in university yet. So I just gave a talk of emerging science and technology to a group in Queens College in April. And we're trying to reach the Advanced Biology students in high school. That's the next wave next generation, you know, in the veterinary schools are not teaching yet when I go out and speak at conferences, one of my sons is a veterinarian now for three years. And it's funny that, you know, he grew up with a father that was passionate about stem cells. So he knew about stem cells. And he said they weren't taught one word about them. And he graduated three years ago. And that's sad. So yeah, I’m on human boards and I’m on four boards all together. So I work with what we call autologous stem cell therapy, which means we take them out of your dog and put them back into your dog. We don't take them out of another dog and put them into your dog that would be allogeneic. And if I took them out of a pig and put them in your dog, that'd be called xenogeneic. and so I don't work with at this time, I don't work with allogeneic or xenogeneic. I only work with autologous therapy, which means I treat the patient with his own stem cells. And so what we're doing is we're harvesting fat and and generally it takes about 15 minutes to collect three tablespoons of fat from the dog. It's a very simple procedure for for veterinarians, it's within everybody's scope of surgery, easier than spays. And castration is really just to collect fat and and once we collect that fat, we wake them up and then we prepare the fraction of fat that contains the stem cells and separate those repair cells from the fat. And in that solution, we end up with like a soup, we call it the stromal vascular fraction, or the SDF, and in that soup, are the stem cells from the fat, which I said, are the repair cells. And then there's a lot of supporting characters, there's a lot of immune cells, there's a lot of growth factors, there's a lot of these, you know, cells that help form a new matrix or help to rebuild the framework so that they can lay down cartilage or reduce inflammation or do whatever is needed, in the area that we're injecting them. And that's the whole theory. And the promise of stem cell therapy, is if you have a bad knee, I mean, right now the standard of care after they do steroids, and you can just relate to humans, we don't do all of this in the animals, but after they do the steroids and the rooster collagen, and, and you know, they say, Okay, you’re bone on bone, it's time to chop off your knee. And that's as simply as I can explain it. And what I'm hoping for is that they'll start using stem cells, and around the world, there's been hundreds of 1000s of people treated with their own stem cells with adverse events being declared insignificant, because your body doesn't reject your own repair cells. So as long as you have a good technology that separates out those stem cells, and you inject them back into that micro environment that is damaged like a bad knee or back to bad knees, or bad tempered bad shoulder, or bad bone or ligaments, then we're hoping that we can initiate some repairing, I just gave a talk out at one of our big conferences in Las Vegas in September and presented 27 peer reviewed publications in veterinary medicine. And out of those 27 peer reviewed publications, 26 of them showed cartilage regeneration. So that's pretty significant. So now the information is coming out. And soon you'll see more and more doctors start to apply it, they just needed to see the science first. You know, here I am 35 years into my career. And when you get a dog, a lot of us older veterinarians, men and women, when we get these patients that we've seen our whole career, where they have this horrible arthritis, or they have a lot of pain, they're having difficulty walking, they're overweight, because it's hard to exercise them. They may be 10, 11, 12, or 14 having trouble getting up and the owners are having trouble picking them up. We've given them steroids, we've done all the nutraceuticals, chiropractic, acupuncture, all the holistic things we can do. And the poor dogs or cats are in pain, and they just can't stand without assistance. And that's why I love to come into stem cells. because up till then we had nothing else. But unfortunately, that discussion about is it time? because your dog can't get up in the morning suffering. And that's the hardest discussion for any veterinarian. So all of us in that situation, would gladly want to try to give some repair cells that could perhaps not only put time on the dog's life for the cat’s life, but quality times so they end up in a situation where his quality of life, they're in less pain they're in, you know, there have more mobility and flexibility and range of motion. So those dogs instead of trying to go to the bathroom in one place or moving around, because they can't because the pain or trying to get in and out of the car or on the furniture up and down the stairs, we treat them and generally in three to six weeks, seven weeks, they're doing those things again, and it lasts for a year, year and a half on average, which is pretty cool stuff. And, and I think anybody would want to do it. And now the price has come down back in 2007, we were treating dogs, it was about 50% More expensive than it is now. And now we're down in that range of a typical surgery. And it makes it more affordable to more people. And I wanted to, you know, get down to the hundreds of dollars instead of you know, $1,800 or $2,000. And it's a and I think the more animals that we start treating the more veterinarians that get involved, we'll get those economies of scale just like any other new technology. When it comes out. When more people start using it, the prices come down. And you said that you get these cells from the dog themselves these fat cells. Where in the body are you taking them or harvesting them from? Good question we can harvest from anywhere that there's fat and most dogs when we go on body condition score in cats too, body condition score, four to five out of nine is considered ideal body weight. So that's the dog where you can see their last two to three ribs, when they take a deep breath. Most people would call that dog skinny, but every veterinarian would say that's ideal. That’s the perfect body weight. they live longer. So I would say 55% of patients I see are at a six out of nine to seven out of nine, which means they're in each numbers about 10% of being overweight. So seven out of nine is 20% overweight if we say five is ideal. So those dogs usually have a pocket of fat behind their shoulder blade up towards the top of their back. That is a goldmine for fat so I take a lot of the fat from dogs in that area, because a lot of them are a little overweight. If they're a thin dog, I take it from their belly, we take it just in front of their belly button. towards the head, there's a what we call a falciform ligament, which is truly all fat. They're born with it. And we can take the fat right there. And we can get enough fat from that area to process and it's about a 15 minute procedure either way. That's cool. So if more veterinarians are doing this, and it's not taught in vet school, could any general practice veterinarian do this? Or is there some training involved? So it's my favorite question. So when I go to these conferences, and when I tell that they can be doing it the following week, all they need is the equipment and the technology, the technology for in house therapy. So yesterday, I did two treatments with stem cells. So I harvest the fat or I start surgeries around 7am. So I started my first one at 7am. 7:20, I gave it to my tech, and my tech starts processing that fat. It takes about two and a half hours in house. And that process is done by qualified technicians that have been put through a very simple training procedure, which is within their toolset very, very easy. It's like baking a cake, you're just following instructions. And so the first few times, and I got to go over when they were doing the first one in a state, Utah, Florida, Colorado, California, I would go in their business back in 2010-2011. I fill out there and I joined them, I would say have at least two cases, so I can show you on one how to process them show the technicians. And on the second one, they do it and literally they were doing it on the second one. So it's a very simple process. And once they learn it, they get so comfortable with it. And you know, I've had film crews come in and put this film camera on the shoulders of my technicians as they're doing this, and they could care less. That's how confident they get with this technology. And obviously we're keeping the cells sterile, we're doing it in a process that's been developed and rings out a lot of those cells that are in the fat. And then we we get them two and a half, three hours later, and we can inject them. So the treatment is an outpatient procedure. People too. you go in in the morning, like I said, the dogs are 7:00, most of them are heading home by noon or 1:00, you know, as soon as we're done. If I'm doing a second one, obviously, I'm not getting that into the surgery until maybe 7:30 or a quarter of eight. So then that one's going to go home a little bit later. Because it takes to me I can't speed up the processing, but the technicians do it. So the veterinarians, we require about 15-20 minutes for a time to collect the fat. And then when it's all processed, we give the dogs some light sedation and we inject the joints or the affected areas that we want to treat. And and that takes about five minutes and then they can go home because they can go home sedated. As long as the owners are are willing, and most of them are, we send them home usually by one o'clock. Okay, that sounds so easy, much better than surgery. Yes, and every veterinarian can learn this so easily. And literally, they just need the equipment and the equipment requires us to have a big centrifuge, and a water bath at body temperature that moves and after digesting the fat and that's how we separate the stem cells from it. And then an LED which is a laser emitting diode that has international patents on it all around the world that that we use on humans too, and when we put that fraction that soup that we get that stromal vascular fraction into the LED, it activates the stem cells. And what that means is it wakes them up because they're in the fat, they're dormant. They've been residing there, but they haven't been moving. And so we wake them up and we get them to start proliferating. And stem cells are very good at repopulating more stem cells so they can grow new stem cells, or they can differentiate into tissue like cartilage or bone or, or ligament or whatever we're trying to treat. And they can also secrete a whole bunch of things, a whole bunch of factors, they've identified over 17,000 genes that they can secrete. And those things will go into that microenvironment that damaged knee, that damaged area and start to grow new cells, they know what to do. In 2008-2009. When I first started speaking about stem cells, I knew about 12 things that they can do. So transform now to 2021. I know about 48 things they can do. So you say wow, that's pretty good. We we grew 400% in 10 years, 12 years. The problem is or the good thing is, is that when you're injecting those stem cells into that damaged environment, just on the side of what I'm injecting in, there's probably five to the 200th power of the available things that those stem cells can do. So super computers can't figure it out. And then you have the damaged cells on the inside the inflammation. They're what we call communicators, they're sending out distresser signals, and you know, hey, body, we need some help. We need some repair, we need some reduced inflammation we need to calm down or modulate the immune system. And they're interacting we call that the paracrine effect. It's like the endocrine system where we secrete a hormone like a thyroid hormone that helps regulate our metabolic rate with these cells communicate with each Other in this local environment, and that's what sets up the repair or the reduced inflammation, or whatever's best for that joint. And it's pretty neat. Because when you look at the age of a dog or cat, and I treated camels, horses, you know, I've been over zoo animals, they, you know, every animal that has that has repair cells. And like I said, you can, they've shown this, they publish these results in humans, they get a heart attack, we were always taught, once you have a heart attack, you have scar tissue for life, you're never going to reduce that scar tissue. So your heart will never be as efficient as it once once. Well, that's been proven incorrect. We can inject stem cells into that heart muscle. Now I'm not doing this in dogs, but it's been done in people and then animals and published and they can regenerate that scar tissue into normal, functional, beating heart cells again, and it just blows everybody away, including me. That's why I get so excited talking about this. Because, you know, these are the kinds of things we are taught that you can't once you tear your meniscus, you can't grow a new meniscus, it's gone. And people are shaking their heads. They're listening right now. Yeah, I had part of my meniscus removed. And that's just for the cushions in the knee joint. You know, they're on both sides C shaped cartilage. Once you damage and we were taught I was taught you can't regenerate. Well, guess what they've done clinical trials on animals. And now they're doing it on humans. And I'm privy to some of this information where they can 3d print a scaffold, which is kind of the framework for this cushion in our joints, this meniscus, they can feed stem cells into it and grow a new meniscus. And with with repair, so yeah, and this is, this is what is happening. That. is so cool. Can I just stop you right there? I know this is exciting, but we just have to take a quick commercial break, but we're gonna dive right in. So hold on everybody. A big thank you to the team at Adored Beast for sponsoring today’s episode. I am a HUGE fan of Adored Beast because they offer a one-of-a-kind line of high-quality, Human-grade, natural products that don’t just treat the symptoms of your dog’s ailments, but also the root causes. With an impressive line of natural, holistic treatments, these homeopathic products address core issues, support healing and aid in preventing reoccurrence. 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