
Gay M. Crooks, M.B.B.S.
Bio
Gay Crooks, M.B.B.S, has contributed to a deeper understanding of blood stem cells, which are found in the bone marrow and continually create all types of blood cells throughout life. Her research defined how these cells can be isolated and manipulated to improve the results of bone marrow transplants, a treatment for a variety of blood diseases, including leukemias.
Crooks’ stem cell focus was born from her clinical work as a bone marrow transplant physician, caring for children with leukemia and genetic diseases of the blood and immune system. Through this experience, she developed a fascination with blood stem cells and has since dedicated much of her research to understanding how these cells create immune cells like T cells. Her ultimate goal is to develop methods to produce T cells that help patients’ immune systems fight disease more effectively.
While pursuing this goal, Crooks became interested in the thymus, a gland that sits just behind the breastbone in front of the heart and produces T cells. T cells serve as the soldiers of the immune system, finding and attacking infection and disease-causing intruders. Crooks’ study of the thymus and its ability to instruct blood stem cells to become T cells led her to develop an innovative “thymus in a dish” model that uses artificial thymic organoids to replicate and improve the production of disease-fighting T cells.
In preclinical studies, Crooks found that adding a specialized gene to her artificial thymic organoids enabled the production of large numbers of cancer-targeting T cells from blood stem cells. This model represents a key step towards producing a readily available supply of T cells that could potentially help treat many different kinds of cancer. Moving forward, Crooks hopes to expand on this work by developing an artificial thymic organoid that could produce T cells from pluripotent stem cells.
Crooks completed medical school at the University of Western Australia, became a fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians at the Princess Margaret Hospital for Children and completed a fellowship in pediatric hematology-oncology at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.
Publications
- Development of allogeneic HSC-engineered iNKT cells for off-the-shelf cancer immunotherapyPublished in Cell on Tuesday, November 16, 2021
- Autologous Ex Vivo Lentiviral Gene Therapy for Adenosine Deaminase DeficiencyPublished in The New England Journal of Medicine on Tuesday, May 11, 2021
- Organoid-Induced Differentiation of Conventional T Cells from Human Pluripotent Stem CellsPublished in Cell Stem Cell on Thursday, January 17, 2019
- Generation of mature T cells from human hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells in artificial thymic organoidsPublished in Nature Methods on Monday, April 3, 2017
- Medial HOXA genes demarcate haematopoietic stem cell fate during human developmentPublished in Nature Cell Biology on Monday, May 16, 2016
- Long non-coding RNA profiling of human lymphoid progenitor cells reveals transcriptional divergence of B cell and T cell lineagesPublished in Nature Immunology on Monday, October 26, 2015
- GPI-80 Defines Self-Renewal Ability in Hematopoietic Stem Cells during Human DevelopmentPublished in Cell Stem Cell on Thursday, January 8, 2015
- Erythropoiesis from Human Embryonic Stem Cells Through Erythropoietin-Independent AKT SignalingPublished in Stem Cells on Friday, May 23, 2014
- Human Lymphoid Development in the Absence of Common γ-Chain Receptor SignalingPublished in The Journal of Immunology on Friday, April 25, 2014
- Human Developmental Chondrogenesis as a Basis for Engineering Chondrocytes from Pluripotent Stem CellsPublished in Stem Cell Reports on Thursday, December 12, 2013
- Perivascular support of human hematopoietic cellsPublished in Blood Journal on Thursday, February 14, 2013
- Characterization and Therapeutic Potential of Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell-Derived Cardiovascular Progenitor CellsPublished in PLOS One on Tuesday, October 9, 2012
- Gene therapy for adenosine deaminase–deficient severe combined immune deficiency: clinical comparison of retroviral vectors and treatment plansPublished in Blood Journal on Tuesday, September 11, 2012
- Lymphoid priming in human bone marrow begins before expression of CD10 with upregulation of L-selectinPublished in Nature Immunology on Sunday, September 2, 2012
- Mapping the first stages of mesoderm commitment during differentiation of human embryonic stem cellsPublished in PNAS on Monday, July 19, 2010
- Human hematopoietic stem/progenitor cells modified by zinc-finger nucleases targeted to CCR5 control HIV-1 in vivoPublished in Nature Biotechnonlogy on Friday, July 2, 2010
- Regulated Expansion of Human Pancreatic β-CellsPublished in Molecular Therapy on Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Honors & Affiliations
Honors
- Morris and Mary Press Physician Humanism Award, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, 2007
- Stohlman Scholar Award, Leukemia Lymphoma Society, 2004
- Basil O'Connor Research Fellowship, March of Dimes, 1994
Affiliations
- American Society of Bone Marrow Transplantation
- American Society of Hematology
- American Society of Gene Therapy
- Director, Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center Cancer and Stem Cell Biology Program
- International Society of Experimental Hematology
- American Association for the Advancement of Science
- Society for Pediatric Research
- International Society for Stem Cell Research
Funding
Crooks’ research is funded by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the National Institutes of Health and the UCLA Broad Stem Cell Research Center, including support from the Sherry, Dave and Sheila Gold Foundation.