Like any sport, horse racing has its highs and lows. For Patrick Casey, a highpoint came eight years ago when El Tana, his standard-bred, won three races at Alexander Park, New Zealand’s premier racing venue. “As a friend says, that’s the most fun you can have with your clothes on,” says Casey, an Auckland-based scientist. The wins came at a perfect time. Casey had been trying to scrape together enough cash to finish a house he was building for his family on 12 acres in Kumeu, an Auckland suburb in the birthplace of the country’s wine industry.

 

El Tana’s victories suddenly made the animal something of a hot commodity. Casey managed to sell the horse to American racing enthusiasts for $50,000. “It literally allowed me to furnish the entire house,” says Casey.

 

But lately, it’s the lows in the sport that have energized Casey and made him a minor celebrity on the horseracing circuit. Tendon injuries can be career-killers for horses: only 5 to 15 percent of those with damaged tendons will ever make it back to the track, he says.

 

But a novel treatment that Casey developed—injecting adult tendon cells grown in a lab into horses’ injured core lesions—has had remarkable success. The first 10 of 14 horses treated have returned to intensive training, and seven of these racers are back in full competition, he says. “We’re putting back natural tissue into a defect that has formed,” says Casey. “It’s minimally invasive. So far so good.” But the 41-year-old is quick to add he’s no miracle healer. “This is a way to treat, but we’d really be wrong to say it’s a cure. You’ve always got a chance of recurrence.”

 

Cautious, perhaps, in his science, Casey lives life at full gallop. These days, he’s often on a plane heading to the United States, Europe, or somewhere else in Asia on business for New Zealand-based Therapy Cells, the company he cofounded to commercialize the new tissue transplantation therapy. On a recent weekday, he alights for some downtime at Napa Valley’s Regusci winery, where he seems to know just about everybody who runs the place. After a morning of meetings at the University of California, Davis, where Casey earned his Ph.D.in comparative pathology in 1992, he’s ready to loosen up a bit with a glass of the family-owed winery’s cabernet. “We’re an Irish-Catholic family and we went to the races,” begins Casey, recalling his childhood in Tuakau, New Zealand.

 

“But I was always keen on all animals, not just horses.” Casey’s father was a rural bank manager who was often on the road visiting clients. One of seven children, Casey occasionally accompanied his father on his rounds. It was during those trips that Casey got to know one of his dad’s clients, veterinarian Charles Roberts, who’s renowned for developing a procedure to reduce one horse fetus in mares pregnant with twins. (In horses, a twin pregnancy often ends with both foals dying and can also jeopardize the mare’s survival). One day, Casey recalls Roberts telling him “‘I’ll see you tomorrow at the races and bring your pajamas. You’re going to come home with me to learn.’” When it came time for college, vet school was the obvious choice. In just four years, Casey finished the five-year program at Massey University, one of only nine schools outside the United States to be accredited by the American Veterinary Medical Association.

 

Next came an internship in horse surgery in Kentucky, his doctorate at U.C. Davis, and a residency in equine reproduction. After that he headed a research program at the University of Auckland and founded several companies focused on products and services used in animal reproduction. Being a vet by training, Casey says, has made him a better problem solver. “You can identify areas where there is really a need,” he says.

 

It was eight years ago that Casey and some colleagues began a pursuit that would flout science convention: getting adult tendon cells to grow. Most scientists consider it difficult to get adult cells to divide and replicate. “We started thinking about how we could get a cell restarted,” says Casey. For him, focusing on the adult tendon cells of horses was a natural place to begin, as it combined both a lifelong interest in the animal with an unmet need: There was no effective treatment for equine tendon injuries. When it’s left to time to heal, the process is led by specialized cells called fibroblasts, which secrete collagen to infill the wound. But often there can be scarring, Casey says. “If it’s a larger injury, you are never going to get it to heal perfectly,” he says. Scientists have tried many therapies, including the use of stem cell-like cells (progenitor cells of the mesenchymal line), Casey says. But it’s been challenging to get these non-differentiated cells to behave like tenocytes, or tendon cells. When a racehorse is injured, it can mean tens of thousands of dollars down the drain.