A leading UK horse charity has teamed up with genome researchers in an effort to beat the equine disease strangles. The Home of Rest for Horses, based in Buckinghamshire, England, has financed a £250,000 ($390,000) project to decode all the genes in the bacterium that causes strangles, Streptococcus equi. Hundreds of outbreaks of strangles occur each year in the US and they are often difficult to control and individual cases can be difficult to treat.

Brigadier Paul Jepson, Secretary of the Home of Rest for Horses, said, “The Home of Rest is delighted to fund this work. We thought long and hard and talked to many experts in the field before deciding how best to attack strangles. We are confident that this new approach will lead to breakthroughs in the treatment and prevention of this distressing disease.”

Strangles is the most common infectious disease in horses worldwide and the funding by the Home of Rest is the largest grant in its 100-year history for a single one-year project. Researchers at The Animal Health Trust, one of the UK’s leading veterinary research organizations, have teamed up with scientists at the Universities of Newcastle and Cambridge to tackle the disease with the help of the Sanger Centre, which is a recognized leader in sequencing genomes.

Dr Neil Chanter of The Animal Health Trust near Newmarket said, “Research towards an effective strangles vaccine has been severely hampered by an almost complete lack of knowledge of how S. equi causes the disease