Dr. Jane Salmon is the Collette Kean Research Professor at Hospital for Special Surgery. She is Professor of Medicine and Professor of Medicine in Obstetrics and Gynecology and Associate Dean, Faculty Affairs at Weill Cornell College of Medicine.
Dr. Salmon graduated magna cum laude from New York University and earned a medical degree in 1978 from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University, where she was the first woman enrolled in their Medical Scientist Training Program. She completed training in internal medicine at The New York Hospital and in rheumatology at Hospital for Special Surgery, where she currently conducts clinical and basic research studies and practices rheumatology. Dr. Salmon has served on the Board of Directors of the American College of Rheumatology and Rheumatology Research Foundation. Dr. Salmon was co-editor of Arthritis and Rheumatism and is currently an Associate Editor of Annals of Rheumatic Diseases. At Hospital for Special Surgery, she is a Director of the Lupus and APS Center of Excellence, Co-Director of the Mary Kirkland Center for Lupus Research.
The goal of Dr. Salmon’s research is to identify predictors and determinants of disease phenotype in systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) and related diseases and to thereby identify targets for therapy. In SLE and other autoimmune diseases, autoantibodies and immune complexes initiate inflammation and organ damage through receptors for IgG and complement activation products. The laboratory investigates downstream mediators and effector mechanisms of tissue injury. Their basic, translational and clinical studies have led to a paradigm shift in the understanding of mechanisms of pregnancy loss, cardiovascular disease, and nephritis in patients with SLE. Dr. Salmon’s laboratory defined structure-function relationships among human receptors for IgG, key effectors in immune-complex diseases, and showed that allelic variants were risk factors for nephritis. She led the first case-control study to define prevalence and clinical correlates of pre-clinical atherosclerosis in SLE and found accelerated and premature disease, independent of traditional cardiovascular risk factors, rather related to inflammation. Building on her discovery that innate immune pathways, complement, neutrophils, and TNF-α, are critical effectors of pregnancy complications in mouse models, she led an NIH-funded, multi-center 11-year prospective longitudinal study of 700 pregnant patients to identify predictors of pregnancy outcomes in patients with lupus and/or anti-phospholipid syndrome. She has now embarked on the first interventional trial of biologic therapy to protect pregnancies at high risk for preeclampsia, an approach likely to have broad public health implications.
