The Grey Zone

Dr. Josh Bonkowsky is a co-founder of ALD Connect. He is a pediatric neurologist specializing in clinical care and research.  He is a professor of Pediatrics at the University of Utah School of Medicine.

After graduating from Harvard College, he spent one year on a Fulbright Fellowship in Vienna, Austria.  He received his MD and PhD degrees from the University of California, San Diego, and completed residency training at the University of Utah (pediatrics), Children’s Hospital of Boston and University of Utah (pediatric neurology).

A physician-scientist with interests in clinical and bench research, he studies nervous system development and disease. He has been continuously funded by NIH since 2006, including award of the 2012 Director’s New Innovator grant; and his bibliography includes over 90 peer-reviewed articles.

Dr. Bonkowsky is the Division Chief of Pediatric Neurology at Primary Children’s Hospital, and the Director of the Primary Children’s Center for Personalized Medicine. In addition to these duties, he enjoys his more informal roles, such as the summer picnic with taco truck; and, critically, the Annual Cookie Contest.

Since 2006, Dr. Bonkowsky has personally mentored 60 trainees; including 35 women, and 7 under-represented minority trainees.  Together with his wife, a pediatric infectious disease physician, he juggles his personal and professional responsibilities.  In his “spare” time he enjoys camping with his daughter, building a quasi-functional radio telescope with his sons, and trail running.

Dr. Stephan Kemp is a Professor at the Amsterdam University Medical Center, the Netherlands. He was trained as a translational researcher at Johns Hopkins University/ Kennedy Krieger Institute, Baltimore, Maryland, USA and obtained his PhD in 1999 at the University of Amsterdam. Dr. Kemp has more >25 years of experience with ALD research and published >90 papers and book chapters on ALD. In 1999, together with Dr. Hugo Moser, he founded the ALD Mutation Database (www.x-ald.nl), which moved to www.adrenoleukodystrophy.info in 2017. He is a member of the scientific board of the European Leukodystrophy Association (ELA) and the United Leukodystrophy Foundation. Dr. Kemp is the project leader of the SCAN study; the pilot for implementing ALD newborn screening in the Netherlands. In 2015, he received the AMC Societal Impact Award (ASIA). His research focuses on lipid metabolism and neurotoxicity.

Dr. Troy Lund is a Professor in the Department of Pediatrics, Division of Blood and Marrow Transplantation and Cellular Therapy, and Associate Director of the Leukodystrophy Center at the University of Minnesota, the largest transplant center for boys with cerebral ALD.

He is a recognized expert in allogeneic bone marrow transplantation (BMT) and gene therapy and has provided clinical care to boys with ALD from around the world.

Dr. Lund is deeply committed to advancing safer and more effective treatments for cerebral ALD. He leads multiple active research efforts aimed at improving outcomes for boys at every stage of disease through an integrated bench-to-bedside approach that spans both clinical care and laboratory investigation. A longstanding focus of his work is biomarker discovery. His current research seeks to identify predictive biomarkers that emerge before changes appear on MRI, with the goal of determining which patients are most at risk for developing cerebral ALD.

In addition, Dr. Lund is investigating the mechanisms underlying transplant efficacy, with a particular emphasis on peroxisome transfer. He is also exploring innovative strategies to enhance brain engraftment following allogeneic BMT or gene therapy, a critical step in which infused cells must cross the blood-brain barrier to halt disease progression. His team is leading efforts to develop therapies that may improve this process and increase overall treatment effectiveness.

Dr. Lund is also pursuing non-transplant treatment approaches for cerebral ALD. This work focuses on therapies designed to reduce neuroinflammation and potentially diminish or eliminate gadolinium enhancement on MRI, offering the possibility of disease control without the need for transplant.

University of Minnesota