VetCell Bioscience, which was set up last year by Roger Smith, a professor at the Royal Veterinary College, has seen demand for its service grow rapidly and the company is currently treating about 30 horses per month for a fee of up to £2,000 per animal.

The London-based company has developed a technique that uses stem cells drawn from the umbilical cord blood of foals or from adult horses’ bone marrow, to treat muscular injuries to horse’s leg tendons.

David Mountford, VetCell’s chief executive, said: “Tendinitis is a leading cause of retirement for racehorses that the traditional veterinary profession has had a lot of difficulty treating.”

Mr Mountford claims that the treatment, which involves injecting cultured horse stem cells directly into the damaged muscle, is twice as effective as conventional therapies for muscular injuries to racehorses, which are often valued in the millions of pounds.

The company already has customers throughout Europe and the Middle East and has licensed out the technology for use in Japan, Australia, Argentina and South Africa.

Mr Mountford says that the therapy allows the muscles to heal without the usual scarring and lesions, which lead to stiffness and a propensity to further injury.

The company also offers a service in which stem cells are taken from valuable racehorse foals at birth and cryogenically stored in case of injury later in their lives.

Now the company is using its expertise to set its sights on a bigger prize — a potentially revolutionary stem-cell-based treatment for human shoulder injuries that, if successful, could be worth billions of pounds.

Mr Mountford said that the company is at present developing trials for a treatment for similar “rotator cuff” injuries in human beings, in partnership with the Institute of Orthopaedics and Musculoskeletal Science.

“It’s a very exciting future prospect,” Mr Mountford said, adding that 60 per cent of elderly people in the UK experience shoulder-related injuries, representing millions of doctor visits per year.

Francetta Carr, a spokeswoman for the Bio-industry Association, said that the technology was a “very encouraging step” for the use of the technology in human medicine.

“Stem cell therapy has huge potential for treating disease, although most of the research is going on in academia,” she said.

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