Welcome Colony Administrator Stanton Gray
Throughout his 23-year career, Stanton Gray, D.V.M., Ph.D., DACLAM, has sought to improve animal and human health as a veterinarian, colony manager and researcher. Combining both animal care and independent research is often a challenge. Each role requires high levels of dedication, time and energy, and it is rare to find job structures that provide support and protected time for both.
He has found his sweet spot at Texas Biomed and Southwest National Primate Research Center, where he will dedicate one-third of his time to research and two-thirds to managing the center’s three breeding colonies of baboons, rhesus macaques and marmosets.
“This is what I’ve been working towards and hoping for,” says Dr. Gray, who recently began as both Associate Professor and Colony Administrator. “I am thankful I didn’t have to choose one path or the other.”
Dr. Gray’s expertise lies in working with pedigreed nonhuman primate colonies that have been carefully studied over generations. He uses detailed genetic information to investigate how genetic variation influences diseases like obesity and cancer. Teasing apart genetic factors from environmental influences or epigenetics – changes to the genome that occur throughout life – is difficult. But with nonhuman primates, it becomes possible to get answers that benefit both animals and humans.
“Pedigreed nonhuman primate colonies have this unique ability to answer questions about complex genetic diseases,” Dr. Gray says. “They can answer questions about how genetics contribute to disease risk in ways that you can’t easily answer with human studies.”
Dr. Gray studied zoology and population genetics at the University of Oklahoma and veterinary medicine at Oklahoma State University. After a few years in private practice, he decided to go back into research.
Pedigreed nonhuman primate colonies have this unique ability to answer questions about complex genetic diseases.
Dr. Gray
“I had the fire in my belly to do research,” he says. “I really enjoy the creativity to pose questions that have not been answered and work towards a better understanding.”
He completed his Ph.D. in molecular pathology at Wake Forest University. Before joining Texas Biomed, he managed a colony of 1,000 rhesus macaques at the Keeling Center for Comparative Medicine and Research at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. He also researched conditions that affect both humans and macaques, including colon cancer.
Specifically, he and collaborators Eduardo Vilar-Sanchez, M.D., Ph.D., at MD Anderson and Jeff ogers, Ph.D., at Baylor School of Medicine, are developing an anti-cancer vaccine that could help reduce colon cancer risk for people with Lynch syndrome. This genetic disease involves mutations in “mismatch repair genes,” which normally repair mistakes that occur during DNA replication. The mutations result in nonfunctional proteins which inhibit that repair function and are linked with extremely high rates of colon cancer, as well as other forms of cancer.
Colon cancer is also the most common form of cancer in rhesus macaques. Dr. Gray is seeking to understand if mutations in mismatch repair genes in macaques cause colon cancer through the same or similar pathways as people. If so, rhesus macaques would make excellent models for studying the disease and potential interventions for both humans and animals.