Not a day goes by that Beaverton Police Department K-9 Officer Ken Magnus, doesn’t depend on his partner Jago, while in the line of duty.

“I've been able to avoid a physical fight with somebody because I've had him with me,” said Magnus, referring to the German shepherd.

But in January, Jago suffered from a serious injury.

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“We were tracking a burglary suspect and Jago went over a wall, took hard fall and twisted his body,” said Magnus. “A week later, Jago started getting really stiff.”

Doctors diagnosed Jago with severe arthritis and prescribed medication for him. Magnus said the medicine only seemd to make Jago worse because of its side effects.

“It got to the point where he couldn't lift himself up from a lying down position,” said Magnus.

So Magnus took Jago to a Beaverton animal clinic to try a new non-embryonic stem cell therapy for dogs. Within weeks of the treatment, Magnus said Jago was back to work, walking and running again.

Link: VetStem

“This is the most exciting thing I've seen in 25 years and maybe in my whole professional career,” said Dr. Tim McCarthy, one of just three Veterinarians in Oregon trained to perform the procedure.

“What we do is harvest 30 grams of fat from the dogs and ship it to a company in San Diego,” said McCarthy. “They extract the stem cells from the fat and then ship them over-night back to us and we inject the stem cells into the joints.”

McCarthy says since learning the procedure, about 80 percent of the dogs he’s treated have shown signs of improvement.

So why isn’t the treatment being used on people? Because some question if it really works, even in dogs.

“The scientific data is just not there to support that this is really that effective,” said Doctor Brian Johnston, who specializes in orthopedic research at Oregon Health Sciences University.

Johnston said he wonders if the dogs’ energy is a result of a placebo effect on their owners and not the stem cells.

“They (stem cells) may in the long term have great therapeutic potential, however, science moves in inches, so it takes a long time to get these cells to be exactly what we want them to be,” said Johnstone.

Even McCarthy said researchers aren’t exactly sure how the stem cell therapy works, but he believes the results are real.

“It doesn't look like the cells actually grow into new tissue, but what they do is they send signals to the body so that the body heals itself.

McCarthy says only time will tell if the results he’s seen will be long term or short term. In the meantime, it appears dogs like Jago have been given a whole new leash on life, and owners like Magnus, are grateful.