WFA Research Grant Cycle

Bob McCaskill, DVM, MPH, DACVPM
Health Committee

Summer, 2005

I personally believe that the Westie Foundation’s year starts in October with our board meeting associated with the Montgomery County weekend. It is this board meeting where we review the grants from the previous year and consider grants for the next year.

Before discussing our status of grants for the year, I thought that I would describe the mechanism of how we determine grants that the Foundation supports.

Grants for research that we support must meet several criteria that our board determined to be important to the breed after our first health survey in 1999. Specifically, the research grant should:

• Be one of the diseases prioritized by the health survey, with greater weight given to lifethreatening diseases
  
  
• Provide for new treatment, a new diagnostic test, or add to the genetic knowledge to the disease
  
  
• Eliminate or reduce pain and suffering in the Westie
  
  

Currently we partner with the Canine Health Foundation and the Morris Animal Foundation for scientific and administrative support. This allows us to utilize their scientific committees to ensure that our research grants meet valid standards. Additionally it allows us to share funding costs with other breeds and to obtain matching funds from CHF or Morris.

Each year these two foundations request pre-proposals from researchers worldwide.In the case of the Canine Health Foundation, they may include requests that affect several breeds (e.g. Atopy) or are breed specific (e.g. Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis). Morris supports health research projects for multiple species (dogs, cats, horses, birds, etc.), while CHF focuses just on dogs.

These foundations send the preproposals to their grant committee for review. They score the grants and select those that they feel have the greatest likelihood of success to submit detailed grant proposals.

The Westie Foundation’s Health Committee receives the list of preproposals from these two foundations. We then request the abstracts for those diseases believed important to the health of our breed. We review these abstracts and score them and prioritize them for relevancy to the establish criteria. We then submit these to the full WFA board for discussion and approval. Once our board approves these grants, we alert the two foundations that we will sponsor the selected grants, should those grants receive full approval. Canine Health and Morris review the final grant proposals and announce their final approvals and the researchers initiate the project.

The primary researcher is required to submit a progress report semi-annually on their work. As joint supporters, we receive copies of the researchers progress along with comments from the foundation scientific committee’s review of the progress.

For example, this year we reviewed 126 pre-proposals sent to the Canine Health Foundation and 210 sent to the Morris Animal Health Foundation. We identified twelve pre-proposals from Morris that we thought had merit for further review. We requested the abstracts of these preproposals. The WFA Health Committee reviewed these abstracts and determined to forward six to the board for consideration and approval to fund in 2006. Canine Health provided us with three final grant approvals. We are in the progress now of reviewing these for support.

Since the start of the foundation, we have supported twenty-six research grants with more than $135,000.00 in Westie Foundation funding. We have developed a great group of volunteers who have helped us get information out on health concerns of the breed and have assisted us in supporting our researchers with cases.

Karen Lindberg started our first disease specific task force. Through her tremendous efforts we were able to get Addison and non-Addison disease DNA swabs to the principal researcher. There is a separate progress report on Addison’s later in the newsletter.

Dr. Fred Askin chairs our task force on Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis. He is also looking for volunteers who are interested in assisting him with this research.

Ann Marie Holowathy chairs our task force on Atopy. She has done an excellent job of organizing volunteers throughout the United States to assist in this area. She supports two researchers at North Carolina State University College of Veterinary Medicine who continue to lead allergic skin disease research on dogs in general and our breed in particular.

If you see them, thank them for their time and dedication to our breed.