Research Spotlight: Annette McCoy

Using about 60 words, how would you explain your main area of research focus to someone sitting next to you on an airplane?

As a clinician-scientist specializing in both equine surgery and genetics, I am particularly interested in the role that genetics plays in the development of the musculoskeletal diseases that I commonly encounter in my patients. These include conditions that develop when horses are very young (a developmental orthopedic disease called osteochondrosis dissecans) and those that occur with age or after an injury (osteoarthritis).

I evaluate DNA for changes in the genetic code that may increase the risk of an individual developing disease, but I also look at changes in gene expression in different tissues (like bone, cartilage, and muscle) to find changes that might signal the earliest stages of disease.

How will your work impact quality of life and benefit society both locally and globally?

One of our biggest challenges in treating osteoarthritis in horses (and humans!) is that often by the time they show clinical signs, it is too late for us to prevent permanent joint damage. Understanding the earliest stages of disease development will help us to diagnose it at a stage when treatments will be more effective and might even be able to reverse the tissue damage. We might even be able to develop new treatments based on a better understanding of the genes involved in the onset and early progression of osteoarthritis.

For osteochondrosis dissecans (OCD), my focus is on identifying animals that carry a large genetic risk of disease so that owners/trainers can make good management decisions and educated breeding decisions. OCD is not totally dependent on genetics, so we can’t “breed it out” completely, but we can hopefully reduce the incidence in our population.

What excites you most about the future of research in your field?

We are really making strides in our ability to integrate different types of data to give us better insights into complicated diseases – for example, gene expression in joint tissues, proteins in blood and joint fluid, MRI imaging, and clinical exam findings.

This will let us evaluate disease from the whole body level all the way down to the molecular level. This is important because it will let us classify disease more precisely – we won’t just diagnose osteoarthritis in a patient, but be able to identify the specific features of the disease. By extension, we can then apply patient-specific treatments that are best for their disease features, rather than relying on generalized treatments that might or might not be the best choice.

This ability to practice “personalized” or “precision” medicine is a really exciting goal.

What tools are critical to the work you do?

Horses are a great dual-benefit model for musculoskeletal disease – research findings are relevant to clinical disease in both horses and humans – but working with animals this large as research subjects certainly has its challenges. I do a lot of work with naturally occurring disease, collecting samples from client-owned animals, but I do sometimes maintain my own research herd so the facilities at the college’s Veterinary Teaching Hospital and Veterinary Medicine Research Farm are critical to me.

I use our high-speed treadmill, in-ground force plate, MRI, CT, and digital radiography. I wouldn’t be able to do any of this without a lot of support from the hospital (and farm) staff, students, and faculty colleagues.

For data generation and analysis, I use the campus resources for sequencing at the Roy J Carver Biotechnology Center and the expertise and resources of the High Performance Biological Computing Center (HPCBio).

How has the broader U. of I. research community factored into your success?

I can’t overstate the value of strong core facilities – not just the machines, but the people. There are so many great resources on campus for developing research programs and relationships – Research Academy (sponsored by the College of ACES) and programming from the Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Institute (IHSI) are two that I’ve been fortunate to participate in. The Beckman Institute has great imaging resources and collaboration opportunities. I feel fortunate to be an affiliate with both Beckman and IHSI, and my interactions with those programs have definitely contributed to my success.

What publication are you most proud of?

This is a difficult question to answer because I have worked in several different avenues of research during my career. If I had to pick one related to work I’m currently doing, I would go with:

McCoy AM, Kemper AM, Boyce MK, Brown MP, Trumble TN. Differential gene expression analysis reveals pathways important in early post-traumatic osteoarthritis in an equine model. BMC Genomics 2020; 21(1):843.

This paper was my first in the field of post-traumatic osteoarthritis and was the basis for a lot of my ongoing research. It was also a really nice collaboration with faculty from different universities. Dr. Trumble (University of Minnesota) and I maintain an active collaboration utilizing the same equine model as in this paper.

If your work depends on collaborations with people in other fields of study, what are those fields?

I work a lot with other surgeons and other genetics experts; some locally and some from other institutions around the country and the world. My primary collaborator at U. of I. outside of Vet Med is in Mechanical Science and Engineering – Dr. Mariana Kersh. We work together to investigate how exercising young horses could help to prevent injuries once they enter athletic careers. I also work with U. of I. collaborators in the fields of animal sciences, bioinformatics, MRI physics, infectious disease, and material sciences. My role in these collaborations is sometimes as a surgeon/clinician and sometimes as a geneticist.