The goal of National Program 103, Animal Health, is to protect and ensure the safety of the Nation’s agriculture and food supply through improved disease detection, prevention, control, and treatment.  Basic and applied research approaches will be applied to solve animal health problems of high national priority.  Emphasis will be given to methods and procedures to control animal diseases through the discovery and development of:

• Diagnostics
• Vaccines
• Biotherapeutics
• Disease resistance mechanisms
• Disease management
• Animal disease models
• Farm biosecurity measures
• Agriculture sustainability

 Strategic Objectives:

Program targets include:

• Find new solutions to prevent economic losses from domestic and foreign animal diseases in agriculture species.
• Develop methods to help producers adjust to changing farming practices that will allow consumer driven issues to be accommodated without compromising financial viability.
• Provide information that will allow the establishment of on-farm practices to maximize biosecurity from naturally or intentionally introduced pathogens that will increase food security, farm productivity, and enhance trade and exports.
• Establish methods to be able to detect, analyze and respond to new and emerging agriculture pathogens.
• Find solutions to maintaining a barrier to pathogens at the domestic-wildlife interface.
• Establish new detection technologies that will allow better tracking and control of animal pathogens.
• Build an integrated research program to discover genetic variations associated with disease susceptibility and resistance to increase our farmers’ productivity and competitiveness.
• Develop experimental animal disease models that will serve the animal and human health research communities to significantly shorten the timelines for developing breakthrough medicines and disease prevention tools and validate countermeasures.

Achieving results in veterinary medical research, which provide useful information for problem-solving, often demands an integrated approach in which the experimental design may range from knowledge development at the molecular level to clinical trials that will lead to the development of countermeasures for preventing and controlling a disease outbreak in the field.  This NP provides the means for the integration of research. For this purpose, select NP 103 projects will be aligned under “Major Initiatives.”  Each major initiative will be outlined as problem statements under the research components of the action plan.  Major initiatives will draw upon relevant expertise within NP 103, coordinating and integrating that expertise to develop a specific useful application of the knowledge.  Major initiative projects may also attract federal, university, industry and international partners. Objectives of major initiative projects will be consistent with those of their base projects. If successful, therefore, they will enhance, rather than detract from, the impact of those base projects on their assigned topics.  Because a significant number of projects in the animal health research portfolio focuses on the discovery of novel technologies, intellectual property strategies will be addressed in project plans to facilitate technology transfers and the investment by the private sector in the development of these technologies.