ACR Honors Accomplishments in Rheumatology

A: I don’t think there’s a higher honor or a greater respect that you can get other than having your peers recognize your work and the contributions you (and others) have done over a relatively long period of time. That’s what something like this means—it’s an acknowledgment of the efforts. I don’t think you do the work that you do for awards. I don’t think anybody thinks about these things when they’re doing the work. You do the work because you like it.

ACR Award

Henry Kunkel Young Investigator

William H. Robinson, MD, PhD
Associate Professor of Medicine, Stanford University, Palo Alto, Calif., staff physician, VA Palo Alto Health Care System

Background: Dr. Robinson earned medical and graduate degrees from Stanford and completed his internal medicine residency at the University of California at San Francisco. He returned to Stanford for his rheumatology fellowship and now operates a 12-person research lab. His team is developing new diagnostic tests to guide physicians in the selection of therapies that will be most effective in an individual RA patient. He also is investigating the role of low-grade inflammation in osteoarthritis. Dr. Robinson, who spends about 15% of his time in the clinic, co-founded the Humane Immune Monitoring Center at Stanford and is director of the Proteomic Core Facility at the VA Palo Alto. He is an associate editor of Arthritis Research & Therapy, and serves on the Medical and Scientific Committee of the Arthritis Foundation’s Northern California Chapter.

Q: What motivates you today?

A: Trying to make a contribution to one of the rheumatic diseases, so that we can help our patients. Even though there has been tremendous progress and multiple new drugs approved over the last 20 years for the treatment of RA and several of our other diseases, there is still tremendous unmet need.

Q: You say diagnostics are objective one in your lab, and that osteoarthritis is objective two. Tell me a little more about your interest in OA?

A: Five years ago, not a single person in my lab worked on OA; now a third of my lab works on OA. We’re very interested in elucidating the pathways driving the progression of OA, and we think low-grade inflammation plays a critical role, much like it does in Alzheimer’s disease and macular degeneration.