Pioneering work on Shropshire border to help sick animals

From the outside it is just another building but inside a brick barn on the Shropshire border is one of only two laboratories in the world undertaking pioneering animal stem cell research.

Scientists at the Veterinary Tissue Bank at Bryn Kinalt, near Chirk, have started carrying out the work in recent months alongside the tissue growth research which they have been doing since the centre opened about four years ago.

Three animals have been helped out in recent months due to stem cell research on live animals, which is being carried out to help pets suffering with conditions such as arthritis.

Vets Peter Myint and John Innes, who set up the tissue bank, have appealed for pet owners to agree to allow their animals to be donors when they die to help other creatures still alive.

They have claimed that a donation of tissue cells from one animal could help up to 50 others.

Under the scheme pet owners are given a tissue donor card for their pet cats or dogs much like the organ donor cards that millions of people choose to carry with themselves.

Inside the lab there is not an animal in sight. Samples of tissue are stored in containers and work is carried out in safe and sterile conditions.

Mr Myint said: This is pretty pioneering stuff. We have now helped our third animal and things are going very well.

He said that the vet takes a small sample of fat from the affected animal and sends it to the laboratory.

We isolate the stem cells and then expand them until there are about five to 10 million cells, he said.

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Pioneering work on Shropshire border to help sick animals