ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2024
The Young Physician-Scientist Awards (YPSA) recognize physician-scientists who are early in their first faculty appointment and have made notable achievements in their research.
About the awardee
Lauren A. Henderson, MD, MMSc is a pediatric rheumatologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. Her laboratory focuses on the role of T cells in autoimmune responses. During her K08 Award, she showed that regulatory (Treg) cells in children with systemic juvenile idiopathic arthritis (sJIA) adopt a Th17 phenotype that is abrogated with IL-1 inhibition (JCI Insight, 2020). This work supports the hypothesis that IL-1 excess in early sJIA predisposes development of chronic, Th17-mediated arthritis. As Dr. Henderson transitioned to independence, she focused on T cell responses in the joints of children with oligoarticular JIA. Her laboratory identified clonally expanded T peripheral helper (Tph) cells that are enriched in the joints of oligo JIA patients with antinuclear antibodies (ANA) and over express factors associated with B cell help. These findings indicate that ANA-positive JIA is driven by dysregulated T cell-B cell interactions, resulting in senior authorships in JCI Insight (2021) and Frontiers Immunol (2022).
During the COVID19 pandemic, Dr. Henderson cared for children with multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS-C). She was a co-first author on a manuscript describing the immunologic features of MIS-C (JCI, 2020), characterized antigen-specific T cells in MIS-C (senior authorship, Clin Immunol, 2022), and identified an inflammatory signature in circulating Tregs from MIS-C patients (co-author, JCI 2022). She lead the American College of Rheumatology’s Task Force on MIS-C (Arthritis Rheumatol, 2020-2022) and serve on the NIH COVID19 Guidelines Panel.