Finding Better Therapies for Dogs with IMHA

THE PROBLEM: Immune-mediated hemolytic anemia (IMHA) is a serious and often fatal blood disease of dogs. IMHA occurs when a patient’s immune system begins attacking red blood cells, leading to their destruction. Despite progress in medical treatment, IMHA has a high death rate. To treat the disease, the immune system needs to be suppressed by medications, but these medications also cause side effects. There is an urgent need to develop better treatments for affected dogs to treat the disease with fewer side effects. 

THE PROJECT: To answer these questions, researchers will use a new technology to examine each blood cell from dogs with IMHA. This will help improve understanding of which genes are turned on and off. The team will compare these results to those from healthy dogs. This comparison will improve knowledge on how and why the immune system ultimately attacks red blood cells. This knowledge can then be used to identify new therapeutic targets for drug development. Additionally, the team will look at how cells from individual dogs with IMHA respond to common medications. The results will be used to create prediction models. These models will be used to help decide which medication will be most appropriate for different dogs with IMHA in future. 

POTENTIAL IMPACT: If successful, results from this study could provide much needed information not only on how IMHA develops but how to optimize therapy for individual dogs.