A Colorado State University veterinarian has recently been awarded a grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop a gene therapy approach to help heal cartilage and prevent osteoarthritis in horses, potentially leading to scientific methods that also may help humans.Joint injury and subsequent osteoarthritis is the most common reason for ending careers in all equine athletes, including racehorses, hunters and jumpers, and Western performance horses. Cartilage injuries in equine athletes are often career-ending because cartilage heals on only a limited basis. Healing is limited because a specific protein called insulin-like growth factor (IGF-I), which is responsible for a number of cellular functions, is not as available in the joint and cartilage as they are in other areas of the body.“The lack of healing leads to cartilage degeneration and progression of osteoarthritis,” said Dr. Laurie Goodrich, a specialiost in equine lameness and surgery at Colorado State University and the principal researcher on the grant.Researchers have not been able to develop a way to maintain enough IGF-I in an injured joint to help it heal. But Goodrich and her team hope that using a viral vector to deliver DNA that increases IFG-I will also increase healing in damaged joint tissues.”Ultimately, our goal is to more effectively treat these types of injuries and return horses to their previous levels of performance,” Goodrich said. “This is good news for horses and humans, alike, as advances in equine joint research will likely apply to humans.”The grant, which is $678,000 over five years, will investigate the success for treating joint injuries with a protein injected into injured joints within a virus-like agent called a viral vector. Dr. Wayne McIlwraith, director of the Gail Holmes Equine Orthopedic Research Center, and Dr. R. Jude Samulski, director of the Gene Therapy Center at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, will co-mentor the project.The Federal Drug Administration (FDA) has recently recognized that the horse is an excellent representative study model for cartilage injury and osteoarthritis in people.