Immunology Interest Group

Virginia Pascual, is a pediatric rheumatologist with long standing interest in Translational Research and a focus on Human Autoimmunity. She currently serves as co-Director of the Baylor Institute for Immunology Research, Program Director of an Autoimmunity Center of Excellence directed toward the study of human lupus and the Baylor-based Human Immunology Program Consortium Center focused on vaccine responses in health and disease.

Dr. Pascual has worked for more than a decade on understanding the pathogenesis of a wide array of chronic and acute immune-mediated diseases, including Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE), various forms of Arthritis, Dermatomyositis, and Kawasaki Disease, as well as a broad variety of infections and responses to vaccination. Pioneering genomic studies from her laboratory identified the role of dendritic cells and Interferon in SLE, and of cytokines such as IL1 in children with Systemic onset Juvenile Arthritis, which has led to successful therapeutic interventions in this disease.

Dr. Pascual’s lab is committed to applying basic immunologic and genomic approaches to the identification of pathogenic mechanisms and biomarkers in human autoimmune diseases. As such, her group has developed an analytical pipeline that integrates longitudinal blood transcriptional profiles together with clinical, demographic and treatment information and that can be interpreted using modular frameworks. Such modular transcriptional repertoires can in turn be used to simplify analysis, facilitate interpretation of large-scale datasets and enable stratification of patient populations based on the immune networks that best correlate with particular phenotypes or disease outcomes.

For more information go to http://sigs.nih.gov/immunology/Pages/default.aspx