Bone Marrow Transplants to Sick Pets Offered By WSU

The bone marrow or stem cell transplant, a procedure that every year saves tens of thousands of lives and won for the Seattle physician who pioneered it the 1990 Nobel Prize in Medicine, appears poised to come full circle and finally become more widely available to those who first made it all possible.

Dogs.

"They helped us figure out how to help save ourselves, and so this represents a big giveback to the canine species," said Dr. Jeffrey Bryan, a veterinary oncologist at Washington State University.

Bryan is spearheading a project to soon launch what would be the world's first large-scale clinical transplant program for dogs. The program is expected to become available to treat dogs with lymphoma sometime this summer.

Bone marrow transplants had been done experimentally in dogs over the decades, Bryan said, and clinically for a few dogs by some pioneering private-practice veterinarians.

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