This patient presented with a butterfly rash typical of systemic lupus erythematosus.
On Nov. 16, the ACR Convergence 2024 session Toward Personalized Medicine in Pediatric Lupus will present important recent findings in the pathophysiology of pediatric lupus.
Virginia Pascual, MD, is program director of an NIAID-funded Autoimmunity Center of Excellence and a NIAMS-funded Center for Lupus Research at Weill Cornell Medical College, New York. Her laboratory is focused on understanding the pathogenesis of systemic lupus erythematosus and other autoimmune diseases, finding biomarkers to guide therapeutic interventions and identifying therapeutic targets, as well as immune responses to a broad variety of infections and vaccinations. Pioneering studies from her laboratory identified the role of dendritic cells and interferon in SLE, and of cytokines, such as IL1, in systemic-onset juvenile arthritis, which has led to successful therapeutic interventions in this disease. She also developed a personalized approach to identify molecular drivers of disease activity in pediatric SLE patients. This approach enabled the stratification of patients into seven major molecular subgroups, which might lead to improved design of clinical trials for this disease.
