Virginia Pascual

Gale and Ira Drukier Director of Children's Health Research and Ronay Menschel Professor of Pediatrics
Gale and Ira Drukier Institute for Children's Health, Pediatrics

Weill Cornell Medical - New York City

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I am a pediatric rheumatologist with long standing experience in Translational Research. My laboratory is focused on understanding the pathogenesis, finding biomarkers to guide therapeutic interventions and identifying therapeutic targets for human inflammatory and autoimmune diseases, including Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE), various forms of Arthritis, Dermatomyositis, as well as immune responses to a broad variety of infections and vaccinations. I am Program Director of a NIAID-funded Autoimmunity Center of Excellence and a NIAMS-funded Center for Lupus Research. I have also directed the NIAID-funded Baylor Human Immunology Program Consortium Center focused on vaccine responses in health and disease. Pioneering genomic studies from my 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. More recently, we developed a personalized approach to identify molecular drivers of disease activity in pediatric SLE patients. This approach enabled us to stratify patients into seven major molecular subgroups, which might lead to improved design of clinical trials for this disease.