Cell therapy is considered a valuable strategy for the treatment of some untreatable diseases in veterinary medicine, especially in the treatment of equine orthopedic diseases with particular attention to ligament and tendon injuries. Isolation and establishment of equine stem cells (eSCs) would put horses in the front lines of animal biotechnology and the modification of animal genomes as well as their therapeutic application. Moreover, eSCs can be a more appropriate model than mouse for human ESCs studies due to the similarities in size, load, and type of injuries of joints. It is widely believed that SCs mediate tissue and organ repair by virtue of their multilineage differentiation and production of different factors, including growth factors, cytokines, and antioxidants. Stem cells are characterized by their ability to self-renew and by their ability to give rise to a more or less spectrum of differentiated cell types. ESC lines have been well established in mouse and human. However, there is a need for developing large animal models for safety testing of such procedures. In our studies, it was found that the putative equine ESCs are able to self-renew when they were cultured in the basic growth medium on γ-irradiated feeder cells. Cell-based therapies using Mesenchymal Stem Cells (MSCs) are being reported in equine medicine with increasing frequency in an attempt to improve the limited intrinsic capacity for complete self-repair of both cartilage and tendon after injury. In our studies, equine MSCs were isolated from bone marrow and fat tissue. The phenotypic characteristics of isolated MSCs in association with their multilineage differentiation potential and gene expression profile confirmed that the isolated cells are MSCs and can be considered as an appropriate candidate for cell therapies in equine regenerative medicine.

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