By Xoel Cardenas, Sr. Communications Specialist, Office of the Vice President for Research
For Dr. Sara Stern, every discovery starts with compassion. Stern is driven by a simple but powerful goal: to create understanding and access for children with Sjögren’s disease, an autoimmune disorder with a propensity to affect the salivary glands and can reduce the amount of tears in the eyes and saliva in the mouth.
People with Sjögren’s disease can have symptoms that affect their whole body. Some of the common symptoms include dry eyes, dry mouth, fatigue and joint pain. However, Sjögren’s disease can also involve major organs and predispose to lymphoma.
While there have been plenty of diagnoses and investigations on adult Sjogren’s disease, childhood Sjogren’s disease has a lot less information and research as well as presents differently with more children presenting with acute parotid gland pain and swelling.
“My research creates understanding and access for children with Sjögren’s disease,” said Stern. “At the end of the day, my goal is to have children being diagnosed in a timely manner and then having doctors to understand childhood Sjögren’s disease and its disease trajectory.”
Recently, Stern was awarded a grant from the Sjögren’s Foundation to develop the first-ever classification criteria for childhood Sjögren’s disease — a crucial step toward defining the disease and accelerating research. The international project brings together pediatric rheumatologists, oral-health specialists, ophthalmologists, patients, parents, and advocacy partners from around the globe.
“We are developing a classification criterion, which helps us define a distinct population of people with a disease so that we can study this disease or see if a medication works, for childhood Sjögren’s disease,” said Stern. “A classification criteria is not a diagnostic criteria, but it allows you to do research studies with a defined population. So that is what we’re doing and it’s an international group. It’s really exciting.”
At the same time, Stern is working as co-principal investigator on an NIH Planning Grant Program (R34) to plan an N-of-1 clinical trial — a personalized approach that uses each patient as their own control to evaluate how they respond to potential new treatments. N-of-1 clinical trials are a unique opportunity to study medications and therapies in rare diseases.
“The nice thing about an N-of-1 trial is you don’t need a huge amount of patients,” she said. “In childhood Sjögren’s disease, we don’t have a huge amount of patients to show that a medication works. Hopefully it’s a pathway to gain FDA approval.”
Why Dr. Stern’s research is personal and matters for families
Dr. Stern’s inspiration is deeply personal, and centered around patients and their families.
“What makes me passionate about the project is really the children and their parents and the families with childhood Sjögren’s,” she said. “When you have a patient in the room with this disease and you don’t have a pathway forward, I feel the need to create a pathway forward to make these children’s lives better.”
Stern credits the University of Utah for fostering the environment that makes her work possible.
“I think the University of Utah is such a special place,” she said. “We need to just keep taking those small steps forward. And before you know it, somebody who never thought they were going to do research is doing unbelievably fun things and that’s because I have the support of my university.”
For Stern, those small steps are already paving the way toward a brighter future for research, medicine, and most importantly, for children.
Dr. Sara Stern is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Pediatric Rheumatology at the University of Utah School of Medicine and Primary Children’s Medical Center. To learn more about her research, contact Dr. Stern.
