Collection of Regular Training Blood Samples for Future mRNA Analysis from Racehorses in Southern California

Our duty to care for and heightened public awareness of racehorses has led to increased pressure for additional research into racehorse well-being and injury prevention. While immense efforts are being employed to identify racehorses at risk for catastrophic injury, these approaches are costly and logistically difficult for large numbers of horses. An additional area that requires focused research is in identifying and preventing non-fatal training injuries given the direct link between previous lameness and/or being placed on a “vet list” and the risk of fatal injury. As such, a critical unmet need is the development of a sensitive and specific, minimally-invasive screening tool to pre-emptively identify horses at risk of injury. Based on our prior and ongoing work, we believe that mRNA expression analysis could provide a sensitive means for identifying racehorses whose skeletons are not coping with training and are at risk of injury such that intervention prior to injury may be possible. Before the possibility of utilizing this testing modality can be fully explored, however, it is imperative that we gain a better understanding of mRNA expression trends leading up to injury.