Key termsequine; immunophenotype; ISCTmarkersThere has been growing interest in recent years in the use ofmesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) as a potential treatment fora number of important diseases. MSCs were first describedas colony-forming units consisting of fibroblast-like cellsderived from bone marrow (1). Since then they have beenisolated from many different tissues such as adipose, muscle,synovium, dental pulp, tendon, peripheral blood, Wharton’sjelly, and umbilical cord blood (2–4). The biological charac-teristics of MSCs that contribute to their therapeutic activityand the mechanisms of action continue to be studied.Despite many advances in MSC therapy, a specific markerthat defines cultured MSCs and identifies them within theirtissue niche has remained elusive. As a consequence, theInternational Society of Cell Therapy (ISCT) proposed a setof minimal test criteria for human MSCs as a first attempt atstandardization for laboratory and preclinical research. Thesecriteria include plastic adherence, trilineage differentiation toosteoblast, adipocyte, and chondrocyte lineages, and a phe-notype relating to surface marker expression. This latter stip-ulates that MSCs, measured by flow cytometry, must show 95% positivity for CD73, CD90, and CD105 antigens and 2% for CD45, CD34, CD14 or CD11b, CD79a or CD19,and HLA class II (5).These criteria were established only for human MSCresearch. However, the study of MSCs is not limited to humanapplications: many animal models are routinely used in pre-clinical investigation and in veterinary applications. There isan urgent need for a universal marker(s) to define and identifyMSCs from all tissues of origin, which will apply across allspecies.There has been an interest in equine MSC therapy formore than 10 years, especially in the treatment of musculo-skeletal disorders such as tendon or joint disease. In addition,because of similarities in terms of structure and biomechanics,the horse is accepted by the US Food and Drug Administra-tion as an animal model suitable for the investigation of carti-lage and tendon repair therapies for human use. In recentyears, several equine trials have been carried out using MSCsfrom different sources. Most of these reported a positive out-come (6) although the mechanism of action remains unclear.It can be argued that failure to understand the biologicalmechanism of repair hinders development of optimized thera-pies. It can also be argued that the lack of meaningful potencytests will hamper the development of standardized cell prepa-rations. The most important identifying characteristics ofequine MSCs have been plastic adhesion and trilineage poten-tial. The use of cell surface markers has been limited due tothe lack of commercial antibodies that cross-react with equineantigens (7).The paper published in this issue (p. XXX) by Paebstet al. is the first to analyze the complete panel of human MSCmarkers established by the ISCT in equine MSCs derived fromfive different tissue sources (marrow, adipose, tendon, umbili-cal cord tissue, and umbilical cord blood).