KEY POINTS:
Ricky's career was over. The standard-bred horse had a bright future this time last year until the most cursed of all race horse injuries struck.
Ricky is the horse's stable name but his official name is Calder Sensation. Harness-racing enthusiasts will know him as the Australian trotter who came fourth in the 2006 Inter Dominion Championship. At age 5 he was a horse to watch.
Then he blew a tendon, the kind of injury that ends careers for horses. It was so bad Ricky was potentially dog tucker. His leg blew up, his injury was a "massive one" and he was in pain, says owner and namesake Rick Burchell from Geelong, not far from Melbourne.
Burchell's vet suggested the little horse might have to be put down, perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars short of his potential. At the very least, Ricky's chances of racing again were remote.
However, a new technique developed by a scientist/vet from Kumeu may just have changed that. Dr Patrick Casey, 39, has worked out a way to take tendon cells from injured horses, grow them in a Petri dish into a tiny new tendon and inject the cells back into the horse where they grow and repair the injury.
Casey's method is commercially sensitive and he will not reveal how he does it - but Ricky is walking and Burchell and Casey have high hopes he will be racing again by March or April. Burchell says there is no sign the horse ever had a tendon problem.
Like the horse racing industry itself, repairing tendons is a competitive business and Casey is not the only scientist with technology to revitalise the careers of ailing race horses. But his technique is significantly different. Other tendon-repair technology involves the use of stem cells, mostly taken from the bone marrow of the horse. These stem cells are multiplied in a laboratory and reinjected into the tendon.
And this technology is showing huge potential. The number of horses heading back to the track, and winning again, is growing. New Zealand star galloper Xcellent, who blew two tendons early this year, has had the bone-marrow treatment and his prognosis, says part-owner Paul Moroney, is excellent.
The theory with bone-marrow treatment is that the stem cells will take on the function of the tissue into which they are injected - so in the case of the horse they will become tendon cells and repair the injured tendon.
What Casey claims to have achieved is a process where instead of stem cells being used, adult cells from the tendon are taken back a couple of steps to the point of a 9-week-old embryo and reactivated in the laboratory so they can divide again.
They are what he calls dedicated embryonic cells, which means because they come from the tendon already - unlike a stem cell - they do not need to be convinced or trained to be tendon cells.
Casey's method is being hailed by those in the know - and there are not many - as sensational. One who is in the loop is Professor Graham Liggins, one of New Zealand's most renowned scientists and the name behind the prestigious Liggins Institute, the research centre within the University of Auckland.
For many years, Liggins has mentored Casey - who was a boy from West Auckland with an outstanding scientific brain - and backs his science.
Both men hint the technology could be bigger than repairing ruptured tendons in horses. In fact, Liggins says if it survives testing, it could take the controversy out of stem-cell work where it relates to embryonic foetal tissue.
"I think people have focus ed in a different direction and have really not considered the direction that Patrick is pursuing," says Liggins.
He expects scientists who read about getting adult cells to divide again to be sceptical. This is the usual initial reaction to new science, he says, and a healthy one.
It is too early to claim more. But where it appears to be working, so far, is with horses. Casey's work involves intellectual property and patent issues and there are no peer reviews and no university studies. But he has set up a company, Transplantation Ltd, and hopes to take his technology to the world, setting up centres of excellence, within months. He also says talks are under way with American institutions to test the technique in humans.
Casey explains his theory. Any cell textbook, he begins, tells you that body cells are genetically programmed to divide a certain amount of times as a developing embryo, then stop. There are a few exceptions, such as the liver, but the basic tenet of textbooks is that adult cells are on stop. A few years ago, he asked himself, "what if they're not?"
"What if they actually pause and the thing that put them on pause has nothing to do with the genetics at all but what it's got to do with is what I'm calling spatial compaction. What if when you're a developing embryo your cells just keep dividing until they fill the skin up? And then they stop.
"And then, if they stop, they're on pause. So if you took a cell out of that environment you could then stimulate it to start up again and divide again."
This is what he says he has done - found a way for an adult cell to go from "stop" and to push "play".
The reason horse tendons don't repair properly, he goes on, is because the body cannot grow more tendon cells. Scar tissue is formed but there is always a point of weakness.
"Our idea was, would it be possible to take a little sample of a tendon and grow it. That's it. And if we could grow it outside of the body, we could grow enough tendon cells, put them back into the rupture and then it could fill up the rupture."
He started with dead horses, figuring out the techniques of how to remove tendon cells without harming the horse, then how to get them to start growing again in the lab, then how to inject them back in again without harming the horse.
Nine live horses in Australia have had the treatment and all are said to be doing well.
Of potential, Casey will say only: "We'd hope that we'd be able to extend the same technology to other cell types, we feel very positive about that. That's as far as I can go."
But he does talk about the problem with stem cells, referring to former Superman actor Christopher Reeve, who broke his neck in an equestrian accident and was paralysed. Reeve spent the rest of his life trying to find a way to walk again. He didn't.
People focus on stem cells, says Casey, because they don't believe adult cells can divide again, but the big stumbling block here is that with stem cells you need to send them down a pathway of the type of cell you want them to be and then teach them to divide.
"But all people are trying to do is create an adult cell. That's what Christopher Reeve was trying to do, he was trying to create adult cells to actually get a new spinal cord.
"So what we're doing is we're getting an adult cell and it's already dedicated, it knows what it wants to be, we don't have to change that at all."
In Melbourne, another horse vet is consulting for Casey's company. James Vanner has 20 years' experience in equine surgery and reproduction.
He was approached to find some horses with tendon damage. Among the ones he found was one of his own.
He, too, says it is very early days but some of the horses are now up to the cantering and trotting stage and are looking good.
"It's pretty amazing stuff ... It's sort of taking the cells from the other end of the scale and just bringing them back a couple of stages, so yeah, it's pretty exciting stuff. This is totally cutting-edge stuff."
Follow-up ultrasounds are looking positive and it looks as though tendon cells are now growing inside the tendons.
"On ultrasound what tends to happen - when you look at the ultrasound of these horses where a damaged tendon is healing naturally - you end up with a knot of scar tissue just like a tangled ball of wool, whereas in these cells we're starting to see very nice straight lines of tendon cells growing parallel to one another, like a normal tendon.
"I think at the end of the day this will surpass the stem-cell method of treatment, the bone-marrow method. I believe in terms of the racing industry it's going to cut down the attrition rate of horses, the wastage of horses."
Using another approach, the Australian company Vet Biotechnology is doing bone marrow stem-cell transplants and is launching umbilical cord (from foals) stem-cell technology for the 2007 stud season.
General manager David Bridgland had heard vaguely about Casey's work but is more than happy with the "extraordinary" results his own company is getting.
Of 46 horses who have been treated, six are back racing and three of those have clocked up seven wins.
Without having an analysis of Casey's science, Bridgland wondered about how many times adult cells could replicate before they came to the end of their cycle, because cells could replicate only so many times before the process broke down. Casey's method was "certainly something different," he said.
As for Ricky's owner, Rick Burchell, he says all he knows is that the horse is on target to race again.
"It's quite sensational - it is sensational. I'll be over the moon when we win a few races with it again, you know. If this works for Ricky, yeah, this technology is just ... I couldn't put a price on it ... the proof will be in the pudding when we hit the track in March, April."
Expert in the stuff of life
When he's in Kumeu, Dr Patrick Casey is the type of bloke who knocks around in shorts and kicks off his shoes to stop sheep droppings from trailing into the house.
He has a veterinary clinic down the road handling the usual small and large animal complaints, but Casey's no ordinary vet.
Not yet 40, he is a scientist who travels the world consulting on reproduction problems in a variety of species, especially horses. When home, if not down the local pub, he might just be sitting in his living room looking at stallion sperm under a microscope.
Sperm - from human to rare birds - is his big subject. Well, one of them. Of proud Irish ancestry and blessed with the gift of the gab, Casey can yarn away on just about anything and lead it back to sperm.
One of his academic papers - Frozen, chilled or fresh, how should stallion sperm be handled? - sums up the general thrust of his work.
As a scientist and board member for the One Helix Trust, a research centre in reproductive medicine attached to Auckland University's Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Casey and colleagues work to save New Zealand's endangered birds.
One Helix is really another name for sperm - where other cells have a double helix of DNA, sperm has only one.
And when it comes to sperm, often what seems difficult is actually simple, says Casey, who was suspicious about the fertility of male kakapos.
Kakapo society is based on dominance so to check the fertility of the dominant male on Maud Island in the Marlborough Sounds, where kakapos once thrived, Casey and team developed a motorised female kakapo to collect sperm.
It turned out the dominant male had no live sperm so he was removed, allowing a subdominant male to come through and breed because "if you have a dominant male who is infertile it could cripple your entire recovery programme."
Casey expects his cellular research, in which he claims to have found a way to get adult cells to divide leading to successful tendon transplants in horses, to be controversial but says all sorts of science which once seemed a struggle now seems logical.
The kakapo is an example: "Any farmer when posed with infertility of the rarest bird in the world, they would have said 'have you checked the sperm of the male?' If their cows come up empty they look to the bull. Most things aren't really that complex."
One of his projects is the setting up of a cryopreservation centre, or frozen zoo, for native birds. This would be a DNA bank of frozen native bird sperm from every native species, from pukeko which are not endangered, to kakapo, kiwi and blue duck which are.
Such a zoo would be to protect native birds for future generations, but Casey also points out that what you learn in one species lends a hand in other species.
"I'll give you an example. We learnt some really important stuff about embryonic loss in the horse then we were able to show the same biologic system of reproduction and reproductive loss occurred in the human.
"From a scientific point of view, not from a veterinary or medical point of view, the more you can learn about species, all different species, the better your science is."
