Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicines clinical research program will receive funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to support research on common variable immunodeficiency in horses.

Julia Flaminio, DVM, MS, PhD, Dipl. ACVIM, the Harry M. Zweig assistant professor in equine health and assistant professor of large animal medicine, received a two-year grant in the amount of $100,000 to study common variable immunodeficiency in horses.

Cornell University diagnosed the first case of the common variable immunodeficiency in horses in 2001. Horses affected by this disease cannot make antibodies because they lack B cells, which are responsible for antibody production. Cornell’s data suggests that these cells have an impaired development in the bone marrow, but are also lost from the lymphoid tissues with time.

“We have diagnosed this potentially fatal disease in 14 horses,” said Flaminio. “It is intriguing because affected horses that have been healthy for years become susceptible to infections, and present recurrent pneumonia and bacterial meningitis because of the lack of antibodies. The difficulty in understanding this disease is that by the time the case is diagnosed, the cells responsible for antibody production B cells are not present