GENESEE PHOTO
Drs. Jerry Malayer (left), associate dean for research and graduate education, and Shawn Blood (Class of 1989), Zoetis beef strategic technical service veterinarian, present Dr. Jean d’Offay, professor in veterinary pathobiology, with the 2014 Zoetis Award for Research Excellence.
D’Offay wins Zoetis honor for bovine research
J
ean d’Offay, BVSc, DTVM, Ph.D., DACVM, who teaches in the Department of Veterinary Pathobiology, received the 2014 Zoetis Award for Research Excellence in April. The award promotes innovative research, on which the scientific advancement of the profession depends, by recognizing outstanding research effort and productivity. Selection is based on whether the nominee has been the principal investigator in research that has attained or is likely to attain national recognition and which was conducted within the past three years.
The award was presented by Dr. Jerry Malayer, associate dean, research and graduate education, and Dr. Shawn Blood (OSU CVM ’89), beef strategic technical service veterinarian for Zoetis. D’Offay’s work on the bovine herpes virus was the basis for the award.
“It was recognition for my research for a few years primarily looking at the genetics of viruses, especially the bovine herpes virus,” d’Offay says. “We are trying to understand and identify, and hopefully eliminate, the genetic basis for disease, and why some bovine herpesvirus vaccines cause cattle abortions.”
D’Offay does not work directly with the affected animals.
“We isolate the virus when we have a case of abortion in cattle,” he says. “We even have cases from Australia. We are looking at animals in Wyoming and California dairy herds. We look at the viruses isolated from those animals. We don’t put the viruses back into Although the vaccines are sup- other animals.” posed to prevent infections, they D’Offay says his role is to can also have deleterious effects, sequence the genome of the virus, d’Offay says. try to determine the viral genes “The vaccine virus can infect the fetus, and the fetus dies, causing abortions,” he says. He also looked at incidences of respiratory infections in feedlots that could be attributed to the bovine herpesvirus vaccines. “We looked at under what conditions does the vaccine virus do that, and when do we have to be careful using them. We are trying to understand and identify and hopefully eliminate the genetic traits that allow the vaccine virus to cause disease,” he says.
responsible for abortions, and share the genomic sequence with other researchers by downloading it on the Web,” he says.“The same data we use to draw our conclusions is available to other researchers to study and draw conclusions of their own.“
He is near completion of another research project involving a simian T-Lymphotropic virus (STLV). “It is a virus that affects primates naturally which is closely related to a human virus that causes cancer and paralysis in adults in tropical countries.” He said a colony of baboons at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center in Oklahoma City are naturally infected with STLV. “We had some dying of lymphoma. I was trying to determine what genetic changes in the virus allowed it to cause cancer,” he says. BEVERLY BRYANT
D’Offay also has won two college teaching awards and a regents teaching award, as well as classroom teaching awards from his students. He has taught immunology and virology at OSU since 1986.
2014 Oklahoma State University
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