An associate professor of medicine at the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine has received the National Insitute of Health (NIH) Director's New Innovator Award. The $1.5 million grant was awarded to Maria Julia Bevilaqua Felippe, DVM, MS, PhD, Dipl. ACVIM, and is presented over five years to stimulate highly innovative research and support promising new investigators who are studying biomedical or behavioral research conditions. Felippe will use the funds to challenge current thinking on a disease that renders people and horses highly susceptible to recurrent bacterial infections: common variable immunodeficiency (CVID).

CVID is the most frequent clinically relevant primary immunodeficiency in humans and represents a mixed group of heterogeneous conditions linked by a lack of ability to produce antibodies that fight pathogens. Although traditional thinking presumes CVID is a genetic disorder, data suggests that only a minor percentage of the affected patients are known to have genetic mutations and that the disease manifests later in life.

"We hypothesize that CVID in the horse is an epigenetic disease," Felippe said, explaining that epigenetic conditions alter the activity, or the expression, of genes without changing their structure. "This could explain why the disease does not appear until later in life. It could also account for our inability to link a genetic mutation to the condition in more than 80% of the human patients."

Felippe became interested in the disease as a graduate student in 2001, when she was presented with a 12-year-old horse that contracted recurrent bacterial infections and meningitis. When the referring veterinarian checked the horse's antibodies, none were detected. With Felippe's further investigation of the immune system status, the horse was found to be lacking a class of cells called B cells, which are necessary for antibody production