The 2022 ACR Awards of Distinction

While at AMC, Dr. Kremer was in charge of the medicine course for second-year medical students for six years and the fellowship director for rheumatology, and then for all medicine divisions. His research activities have focused on the clinical efficacy and toxicity of methotrexate (MTX), following his AMC cohort with multiple publications through 13 years of treatment. He established the hepatic safety of MTX by correlating changes in light and electron-microscopic hepatic histology from baseline and prospective liver biopsies with frequent hepatic transaminase measurements. He has published extensively on the metabolism, mechanism of action, efficacy and toxicity of MTX, including pulmonary, hepatic, laboratory, cutaneous, infectious and malignancy associations. 

He was a recipient of the Engalitcheff Award from the Arthritis Foundation in 1997 for “outstanding contributions to the field of rheumatology in the past 10 years.” He has also contributed several publications on the dietary effects of n-3 fatty acids (fish oil) in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and authored the diet chapter in a leading rheumatology textbook.

Since 2000, Dr. Kremer’s research has focused more on the clinical safety and toxicity of both biologic agents and targeted therapies of RA. He has been an invited speaker at the annual meeting of the ACR on seven occasions, focusing on MTX, fish oil and the value of different research modalities. He has published about 330 peer-reviewed manuscripts, 11 book chapters and four books, along with some

500 abstracts. 

In 2001, Dr. Kremer founded CORRONA (CorEvitas; also see p. 56). He is president and founder of the not-for-profit Corrona Research Foundation. 

Dr. Kremer served as the Northeast president of the ACR in the 1990s and on the editorial boards of Arthritis & Rheumatism (now Arthritis & Rheumatology), Arthritis Care & Research and The Journal of Rheumatology. He has twice served on the committee for publication of Arthritis & Rheumatology and on the ACR Ethics Committee. He is a Master of the ACR.

“I am tremendously honored to have been recognized by my peers at the ACR with the Distinguished Clinical Investigator Award,” says Dr. Kremer. “There are many deserving candidates, which makes this award especially touching and meaningful to me.”

Distinguished Basic/Translational Investigator Award

The Distinguished Basic/Translational Investigator Award, for outstanding contributions to the field of rheumatology, was given to Judith A. James, MD, PhD, vice president of clinical affairs, program chair and member, Arthritis & Clinical Immunology Research Program, Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation (OMRF), Oklahoma City; and associate vice provost for clinical and translational science and professor of medicine and pathology, University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center (OUHSC), Oklahoma City.