AshleyNicoleGrayMD

Summary

• I am currently an Assistant Professor of Clinical Pediatrics at the University of Southern California (USC) and an Attending Physician at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) in the Division of Pediatric Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation (HCT) and Cellular Therapy. I am dedicating my career to improving the morbidity and mortality of children suffering from gastrointestinal (GI) graft-versus-host disease (GVHD). My research interest is focused on evaluating the clinical response and key perturbations of novel microbiome-directed therapeutic interventions such as fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) in children with GI GVHD. To obtain preliminary gut microbiota data in pediatric HCT patients, I conducted a prospective longitudinal descriptive study that identified unique changes in gut microbiota diversity and variation in GI GVHD patients during the post-transplantation period (first author publication, PMID: 37121094). Concurrently, Dr. Grace Aldrovandi and I hold an IND for a Phase I trial in patients 6-75 years old to determine if FMT via capsules is safe and tolerable to administer to allogeneic HCT patients with steroid-refractory/-resistant acute GI GVHD (ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT04280471) which was the first protocol to include children. This provides the foundation for our new oral-FMT via oral suspension in children with acute GI GVHD (IND in progress).