Stem cells and veterinary medicine: tools to understand diseases and enable tissue regeneration and drug discovery.

New sophisticated laboratory techniques, as well as established interactions between basic science, researchers and veterinarians, have led to an exponential increase in our understanding of the animal body in health and disease. The advent of animal cloning, the identification and characterization of stem cells, and publication of the various mammalian genomes has afforded the opportunity to exploit these technologies to better understand disease and develop new therapies. In human medicine, these medical advances are already being translated into clinical practice, the promise being that previously untreatable or incurable chronic diseases will become a thing of the past. In parallel, the veterinary profession is looking to these technologies to explore novel therapies for chronic diseases, such as osteoarthritis in companion animals, and is applying these technologies to enhance food animal production. This review focuses on the emerging area of stem cell biology and explores the potential applications of stem cell technologies to veterinary medicine.

The cloning and functional analysis of canine matrix metalloproteinase-13 gene promoter.

A fragment of the 5' untranslated region corresponding to the canine matrix metalloproteinase-13 (MMP-13), collagenase-3 gene promoter has been isolated and characterized in rat cardiocytes to investigate the role of MMP-13 in cardiac disease. The promoter fragment (1.5 kb) demonstrated regions of sequence homology with the collagenase gene promoter sequences already determined for other species. Conserved regions were identified and shown to correlate with DNA binding motifs including AP-1 sites, a nuclear factor (NF) B-like binding domain, GATA and Nkx2.5 sites. A consensus TATA box was identified and shown to direct transcription initiation approximately 27 bp upstream of the translation start site. The canine MMP-13 promoter fragment was sufficient to drive basal expression of a luciferase reporter gene in both Madin Darby canine kidney cells (MDCK) and primary rat cardiocytes. The activity of the promoter fragment could be significantly increased by the treatment of transfected primary rat cardiocytes with interleukin-1 (IL-1) and basic fibroblastic growth factor (bFGF), with some induction also observed with tumour necrosis factor (TNF). The canine MMP-13 promoter activity has also been compared to the basal and induced activity of the canine MMP-9, gelatinase B promoter in these cell types.