Posts by Allen C. Steere, MD
-
Medical Grand Rounds: A 50-Year Story of Lyme Arthritis
In a recent Medical Grand Rounds presentation, Allen C. Steere, MD, shared his 50-year journey investigating Lyme arthritis, beginning in the 1970s with his identification and description of the clinical syndrome and leading to many pivotal discoveries throughout his decades of work.
-
Cytotoxic Immune Responses May Explain Microvasculature Damage in Post-antibiotic Lyme Arthritis
Allen C. Steere, MD, and colleagues propose that CD8+ T cell–mediated cytotoxicity, CD4+ T cell help, autoantibodies to vascular antigens, and complement deposition may each have a role in microvasculature damage in post-antibiotic Lyme arthritis.
Biography
Dr. Allen C. Steere is a physician scientist who is internationally recognized for his studies of Lyme disease. Dr. Steere's medical school and residency were at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons and at St. Luke's Hospital in New York, a Columbia affiliate. From 1973-1975, he served in the Epidemic Intelligence Service at the Centers for Disease Control. In 1976, while a post-doctoral fellow at Yale, his training at CDC was important in evaluating a cluster of children with arthritis in Lyme, Connecticut. Evaluation of this cluster led to the identification and description of Lyme arthritis. During his faculty period at Yale and subsequently at Tufts, he detailed the clinical features of Lyme disease, identified the spirochetal etiology of the infection in human patients, developed serologic, culture and PCR tests for diagnosis, conducted antibiotic trials, and was principal investigator of the SmithKline Beecham Phase III Lyme disease vaccine trial.
Dr. Steere currently serves as Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Director of Translational Research in Rheumatology at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he studies basic pathologic features of Lyme disease and rheumatoid arthritis. He has been particularly interested in understanding post-infectious Lyme arthritis. These patients develop pathology in affected joints that is similar to that seen in rheumatoid arthritis. In addition, he is currently working to translate his years of experience with infection and immunity in Lyme arthritis to the study of rheumatoid arthritis (RA). He and his colleagues have shown that Prevotella copri, a gut microbe, is an immune-relevant bacterium in RA. They are continuing to identify microorganisms that are a part of the normal flora in the bowel which stimulate immune responses that may affect joints in this disease.
He and his colleagues see patients with Lyme arthritis or rheumatoid arthritis weekly in the clinic. In both diseases, they are researching basic immune abnormalities, knowledge of which may lead to improved diagnosis and treatment of these diseases.