Rheumatology Awards, Appointments & Announcements for Feb. 2018

Dr. Costenbader is the director of the Lupus Program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, where she received her MD. She also has a Master of Public Health from Harvard School of Public Health. She is an associate editor for the ACR’s journal, Arthritis & Rheumatology.

Lupus Foundation’s New President

Stevan Gibson has been named the new president of the Lupus Foundation of America. Most recently, he was chief mission strategy and public policy officer for the ALS Association.

Back in the late 1990s, a mentor in Washington, D.C., suggested Mr. Gibson, the then-press secretary to the U.S. Treasurer, would be a good fit for the ALS Association’s new office that would open soon in D.C. “I don’t do healthcare,” Mr. Gibson recalls saying. “I don’t understand how nonprofits work.”

Soon after that, he took a leave of absence to care for his sister, who was ill with a rare form of cancer, in California. He met with some ALS representatives during his time in California. When he returned to D.C., he opened the new ALS Association offices in November 1997. His introduction to nonprofit healthcare was stark. The situation for ALS patients was worse than for cancer patients: “There were paths of diagnosis and treatment for cancer,” he says.

Fast forward 20 years: “Lupus is even less defined that ALS,” says Mr. Gibson. “Lupus is like a snowflake: It impacts people differently.” Yet there is only one therapy, he says. There must be more money for research to develop treatments for the spectrum of lupus symptoms. Mr. Gibson says it can take as long as five years and as much as $2.5 billion to develop a new therapy. “We cannot count on nonprofits to make that happen,” he says. “We must look to the government for more funding.”

In the meantime, the Lupus Foundation is coming out with a white paper on clinical trials and helping drug companies navigate the path to pharmaceutical approval.

New Rheumatologist in Sonora, Calif.

After a childhood in Russia, Anna Khananian, MD, MBA, moved to Montreal and has continued her travels with a new job in Sonora, Calif., in the Sierra Nevada foothills. She is the rheumatologist at Sonora Regional Medical Center; the first in the area for several years. Dr. Khananian says she left Montreal because she wanted to experience something new. “I wanted to get my feet wet in new waters.” She wanted to know about being a care provider in the U.S., after her time under the Canadian system.