The American College of Rheumatology (ACR) and the Lupus Foundation of America (LFA) have honored two rheumatologists at Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) with prestigious career awards recognizing their transformative contributions to lupus research, education and patient care. The ceremonies took place during the ACR Convergence conference in Orlando, Florida, from November 6 to 11.
Mary K. Crow, MD, received the Evelyn V. Hess Award from the LFA, which honors an investigator whose work has significantly advanced understanding of the causes and management of lupus.
Jane E. Salmon, MD, received the ACR Distinguished Basic/Translational Researcher Award, which recognizes a basic or translational investigator who has made outstanding contributions to the field of rheumatology.
Mary K. Crow, MD
Dr. Crow’s award follows a career spanning more than four decades at HSS, where she is physician-in-chief emeritus and senior scientist, and director of the Inflammation and Autoimmunity Program at HSS’s Research Institute, where she holds the Benjamin M. Rosen Chair in Immunology and Inflammation Research.
“I am truly grateful to receive the Evelyn V. Hess Award,” said Dr. Crow. “I am in great company with all of the previous award recipients who were inspired to focus on lupus, a very challenging disease that pushes you to think deeply about the immune system, clinical disease, and why so many organs are affected.”
A former president of the ACR and a member for 43 years, Dr. Crow has devoted her entire career to unraveling the cellular and molecular mechanisms involved in autoimmune diseases, with particular focus on systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), the most common and widespread form of lupus. By dissecting the immune responses of patients with lupus, she identified molecular targets that are the focus of successful drug development programs, including CD40 ligand and the type I interferon pathway. Dr. Crow continues to study the cellular and cytokine mediators and molecular pathways involved in the autoimmunity and tissue damage that cause disease in people with lupus.
“I study lupus in human patients to understand the entire disease process, beginning with how it starts, why the immune system goes awry, the mechanisms of the resulting tissue damage, and how we may intervene,” said Dr. Crow. “My ultimate goal is to better understand lupus so we can identify novel therapies to thwart this disease.”
Dr. Crow is optimistic that lupus research will open doors to innovative therapies designed to improve patient outcomes and enhance quality of life. “Over the past 20 years we have learned a tremendous amount about how the immune system is contributing to lupus, which has led to new ideas about therapies, many of which are already in clinical development programs,” she said. “There is much current interest in cellular therapies that involve removing a patient’s immune cells, re-engineering them to recognize and attack specific disease cells, and then reinjecting them back into the patient. It's all research in progress, and the outlook for lupus treatment is getting better all the time.”
Jane Salmon, MD
For decades, Dr. Salmon has dedicated her career at HSS to understanding the mechanisms and mediators of lupus and translating these discoveries into advances that have transformed the lives of patients and families worldwide. “This award is a culmination of my life’s goal and the recognition by my peers that I have accomplished what I set out to achieve,” said Dr. Salmon. “It’s magical to go from studying cells to working with pre-clinical models and then to observational and interventional studies. I’m thrilled that I’ve been able to accomplish what I’ve wanted to do since I was a student.”
Dr. Salmon's basic and clinical research have led to a paradigm shift in the understanding of the mechanisms of pregnancy loss, cardiovascular disease, and end-organ damage in lupus patients. She was the first to discover that a genetic variation in the Fc-gamma receptor gene was an inheritable risk factor for lupus nephritis in African Americans . Dr. Salmon also demonstrated that pre-clinical atherosclerosis plaque in the carotid arteries is more prevalent and accelerated in young women with lupus compared to young women without lupus, independent of traditional cardiovascular risk factors.
Through her translational research in pregnancy and antiphospholipid antibodies, which are antibodies that interact with certain proteins in the blood that cause the blood to clot, Dr. Salmon challenged the standard of care for pregnant women with antiphospholipid antibodies, which are present in some patients with lupus. Of note, lupus predominantly affects women and presents during their childbearing years. Her findings from novel mouse models demonstrated that inflammation, not thrombosis, was the major cause of placental dysfunction and fetal loss in women with lupus and antiphospholipid antibodies. As the lead investigator of the PROMISSE study, a National Institutes of Health–funded, multi-center 11-year prospective longitudinal study of 700 pregnant patients, Dr. Salmon identified predictors of pregnancy outcomes in patients with lupus and developed models for early risk stratification that enable physicians to counsel women with lupus about their pregnancy risk.
Dr. Salmon continues to be passionate about helping women have successful pregnancies. She is the main investigator of IMPACT, the first clinical trial to use a biologic therapy to prevent serious complications in high-risk pregnancies in women who have lupus and antiphospholipid syndrome, a condition that puts them at risk for pre-term birth, poor placental development, and preeclampsia.
“What keeps me going in my research is a passion to make a difference in women’s health,” said Dr. Salmon. “I also hope to elevate the importance of women’s health in our society, because understanding women’s diseases helps us understand a broader range of diseases that affect both men and women.”
“I view lupus as a window into the inflammatory-mediated diseases that we see in the general population,” she continued. “If we can understand the inflammatory mechanisms in lupus, we’re likely to be able to apply some of those same approaches to diseases such as atherosclerosis in the general public.”