Company: Advanced Regenerative Therapies.

• Author: Peterson, Eric
• Position: [small biz] TECH-STARTUP

INITIAL LIGHT BULB:

The genesis of Advanced Regenerative Therapies came when Colorado State University experts cross-pollinated their expertise in tissue regeneration and equine orthopedics. Dr. John Kisiday, who specializes in the former, came to CSU in 2005 and connected with Dr. Dave Frisbie, a specialist in the latter at CSU's Equine Orthopaedic Research Center. Frisbie and Kisiday work at the center, a clinical and basic science group founded by Dr. Wayne Mcllwraith, the director of orthopaedic research at CSU.

"We thought of ways we could take advantage of my knowledge of cell culture and their knowledge of orthopedic conditions in animals," Kisiday says. The duo began finding subjects in the form of adult horses with arthritis and core lesions in their Achilles tendons. After extracting adult stem cells from these horses' bone marrow and qrowinq them in a lab, they would inject them into the area of orthopedic impairment. "It was and still is an experimental procedure," Kisiday says.

However, early data is impressive: After two years of therapy, 10 of the first 15 subjects regained function in areas previously afflicted by arthritis and other conditions.

The success overwhelmed the capacity of Kisiday and Frisbie's facilities at CSU, so they spun it off in fall 2007 with the help of Cristin Keohan, ART lab director and Kisiday's wife. The company is owned by a number of shareholders, most of them equine veterinarians who are also customers.

IN A NUTSHELL:

For $1,500, ART provides vets a "user-friendly" means of extracting stem cells from the bone marrow of adult horses. The cells are put on ice and shipped overnight to ART's Fort Collins lab, where they are grown for two to three weeks, frozen and returned to their parent horse for therapy.

Most horses undergoing ART's treatments with arthritis and other orthopedic conditions gained what is called a "return to function."

"The clinical symptoms decreased to the point where the horse could go back to doing the activities it was doing prior to the onset of the condition/' Kisiday says. "Right now, we're very pleased with the results."

But Kisiday and Frisbie consider ART first and foremost a means of furthering their scientific research. "We want to make sure we can direct the research to an appropriate condition...