**10. Future perspectives**

MSC‐based therapy is a promising treatment in repair and regeneration of injured and pathological tissues. Nowadays, even if this innovative therapy in veterinary medicine is still limited, stem cell technology has attracted attention and is a quickly evolving field, among either competitive horses or companion animals, due to the limitations of pharmacological and other current therapeutic strategies. The clinical application of autologous or allogeneic MSCs requires a ready off‐the‐shelf amount of viable cells that maintain unaltered the characteristics of the freshly isolated samples. Although the long experience of cells' processing facilities, consensus is lacking on a universally accepted method for the effective cryopreservation protocol of MSCs and on the maximum time of cryopreserved storage. For these reasons, even if several successful clinical results have been reported by several groups, the methods of stem cells administration need to be improved and the protocols standardized, before a broad spectrum of clinical applications can be successfully achieved. Currently, the Italian Ministry of Health funded a research project to evaluate the safety and efficacy of animal cryopreserved MSCs for allogenic use. These cells are stored and available at the Italian Biobank of Veterinary Resources of IZSLER (http://www.ibvr.org) and the activity is in progress (data not published).
