Hi I thought I’d share some new sarcoid developments with you.
This week I had an interesting meeting & conversation with one of the girls from the Horse Trust, UK.
The Horse Trust have recently funded some research done by Glasgow university into Equine Sarcoids & it is potentially one of the biggest breakthroughs in hopefully treating & combating this disease, although sadly it is only in the early stages & the team are in need of more funding to take this from the in vitro stage to actually testing & developing to see if they can replicate the results in vivo, by developing a way of targeting the sarcoid cells in horses.
“The research, which was led by Professor Lubna Nasir of the University of Glasgow, found that by inhibiting the activity of a particular viral protein within sarcoid cells, the amount of viral DNA in the cells reduced. This led to a reduction in the growth of the sarcoid cells and caused the cell to die by Programmed cell-death (PCD). The researchers believe that PCD occurs because the sarcoid cells become reliant on the virus.”
“One of the challenges with gene silencing is administering it within clinical setting – as you need to get molecules into every cell. As sarcoids are on the surface of a horse, we think administration should be relatively easy – potentially by injecting or applying a cream to the sarcoid,” said Professor Nasir. “If we are able to successfully develop this technique it would be a non-toxic and easy to administer treatment for horses affected by this distressing condition.”
You can read the horse trust full write up of the research on their website
Sadly I don’t think this will be available in the near future, but hopefully it might provide hope for treating sarcoids in the future. I’ll let you know if I hear of any more developments.
With Love
Fiona & Jasper