Elizabeth Mellins, MD, a former professor of pediatrics at the Stanford School of Medicine, a pediatric rheumatologist, and a key investigator in systemic juvenile idiopathic arthritis (sJIA), advanced rheumatology’s understanding of the disease and helped describe the inflammatory lung diseases that can occur in these patients before her death in March 2024.
The ACR will honor her exceptional contributions to the rheumatology community and its patients with the Rheumatology Research Foundation Memorial Lecture: To Memorialize Dr. Elizabeth Mellins, on Sunday, November 8, from 2:30–3:30 p.m. Grant Schulert, MD, PhD, will deliver the session’s main lecture, “The Mysteries of Systemic JIA/Still’s Disease—From Macrophages to Lung Disease and Beyond,” in Room W415D of the Orange County Convention Center. A recording of the lecture will be available to registered participants of ACR Convergence 2026 for on-demand viewing.
Dr. Schulert, Associate Professor in the University of Cincinnati Department of Pediatrics and a pediatric rheumatologist and researcher at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, will trace recent progress in the field’s understanding and treatment of JIA and Still’s disease through the lens of Dr. Mellins’ seminal contributions.
“Dr. Mellins was one of my mentors and really played a key role in launching my career,” Dr. Schulert said. “When I was first starting as faculty, she was launching this international working group to understand what we now call Still’s disease, or sJIA-associated lung disease. She really encouraged me to pursue this area in the clinic and research, and it has become one of my lab’s primary focuses, so she played a central role in launching my research career.”
Dr. Mellins’ early work focused on the mechanisms of antigen presentation and how it becomes dysregulated in autoimmune disease. A critical piece of her research on sJIA and Still’s disease focused on macrophages and the role other innate immune cells play in inflammatory diseases. Dr. Schulert explained that she spearheaded some of the key initial efforts to understand the inflammatory environment in sJIA, the role macrophages play in it, and how they relate to disease complications, including macrophage activation syndrome.
“At the time, we were still understanding the basis of this disease and using it to drive the development and clinical implementation of cytokine-directed therapy for sJIA and Still’s disease,” Dr. Schulert explained.
In the late 1990s, Dr. Mellins and several colleagues intuited the need for a national research network for pediatric rheumatologists and established the Childhood Arthritis and Rheumatology Research Alliance (CARRA). She wrote CARRA’s first grant to obtain funding and served as its first chairperson and head of the organization’s research grant committee.
“It was clear to all of us that we needed to work together,” Dr. Mellins explained at the 2022 CARRA Annual Scientific Meeting. “In fact, in order to preserve the field and move forward, we needed to formalize how we worked together. There were so few of us that we all turned to each other when we had patients who were keeping us awake at night.”
Today, more than 400 pediatric rheumatologists and researchers across North America are part of CARRA. The organization has received millions in funding and hosts a rheumatology research biorepository. Perhaps most importantly, the CARRA registry now follows more than 10,000 children with JIA and other pediatric rheumatic diseases across the U.S. and Canada. A longitudinal observational study through the CARRA registry enabled researchers to search for biomarkers that distinguish sJIA and Still’s disease from other forms of inflammatory and rheumatic diseases.
“Dr. Mellins encouraged me to start thinking about how we could use mouse models and other experimental systems to understand what it is about this disease, and the particular cytokines that drive sJIA or Still’s disease, that might contribute to lung inflammation. We launched that work in my lab, and we’ve continued to this day,” Dr. Schulert recounted.
Researchers investigating sJIA and Still’s disease are trying to definitively answer whether anti-cytokine biologics currently used for some patients in treatment are causing a delayed immune-adverse response leading to lung complications or contributing to their exacerbations. Dr. Schulert will address this controversial topic during his lecture, but he noted that Dr. Mellins once again helped pave the path to a potentially clarifying conclusion.
“This is a big unanswered question and one that really animated the work of Dr. Mellins in the final years of her career,” he said. “Her last really important paper showed that many of these patients have a particular haplotype of HLA (human leukocyte antigen) molecules that differs from patients who have a more typical course of sJIA and Still’s disease, which brought her back to her ‘first love’ of antigen presentation.”
JOIN US IN ORLANDO
If you haven’t registered for ACR Convergence 2026, register today to participate in this year’s premier rheumatology experience, November 6–11 in Orlando, Florida. All registered participants receive on-demand access to scientific sessions after the meeting through September 30, 2027.
