Research Interests
Dr. Cox is a veterinary neuropathologist studying the pathologic changes in diseases of the central nervous system of cats and dogs. She participates in a research group at the Center to identify and characterize genetic abnormalities of cats that result in progressive neurologic diseases, usually due to malfunctioning lysosomal enzymes. These diseases in the cat are almost identical models of similar diseases in human patients so that findings from research are not only important in veterinary medicine, but also may be helpful to better understand and to develop treatments for human patients. She is exploring the use of various methods such as gene therapy, phage and peptide targeting, and adult mesenchymal stem cell and neural stem cell therapies to deliver functional enzyme to affected cells or to alter affected cells so that normal enzyme can be produced by the cat’s own cells. A second area of research interest is in therapies against cancer. With Dr. Tatiana Samoylova and the research team, they are developing of personalized targeted anti-cancer therapies which result in the death of cancer cells, but not normal tissues. They have screened combinatorial libraries of proteins expressed on bacteriophage particles (phage) to select for phage bearing surface proteins that bind with high affinity to tumor cells, but not normal cells. Both the phage bearing the targeting peptide and the peptide itself have potential for the development of diagnostic and therapeutic reagents against cancer. To produce potent peptides with specific anti-cancer activity, we are working on construction of peptide molecules with two domains. One of the domains is a cell-targeting peptide (identified with phage display), which is designed to guide the whole molecule to the target (tumor) cell, allowing cell-specific receptor-mediated internalization. The second domain is a cationic cytotoxic peptide which, after internalization, is able to destroy mitochondrial membrane and cause cell apoptosis. While Dr. Cox’s recent work has focused on a type of brain tumor called glioma, similarly targeted therapies would be applicable to many tumor types. Dr. Cox has also been part of a research team led by Dr. Bruce Smith at the Center and Dr. David Curiel at the University of Alabama in Birmingham which is developing an adenovirus which targets to and is lethal for tumor cells but not for normal cells in the dog.