I’m Aware That I’m Rare: Steve Mathai, MD

The phaware® interview

Dr. Mathai discusses clinical trials and how they’re important for patients with rare diseases like scleroderma and pulmonary hypertension

.Dr. Stephen Mathai is an Associate Professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. His areas of clinical expertise include pulmonary disease and critical care medicine. His research interests include scleroderma-associated pulmonary hypertension, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and pulmonary complications of connective tissue disease.

My name is Steve Mathai. I’m a pulmonologist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and my clinical and research interests are in pulmonary hypertension, and specifically in scleroderma associated disease.

Today, I’d like to talk about clinical trials and how they’re important for patients with rare diseases like scleroderma and pulmonary hypertension.

Clinical trials are really the backbone of advancement in the treatment of patients with any disease. In particular, in a rare disease like pulmonary arterial hypertension and a rare disease like scleroderma, I think it’s particularly important to understand that advancements in our treatment armamentarium for patients really depends upon clinical trials. So, we have a pretty active clinical trial group at our center here at Hopkins, and there are many centers across the country that participate in clinical trials, either as part of pharmaceutical industry clinical trial or even clinical trials that are supported by the National Institutes of Health, the NIH, or clinical trials that are supported by local investigators. So, I think that there are many different ways in which a clinical trial can come to being.

As I mentioned, imperative that we have patients participate in these clinical trials to better understand what we observe either in the lab with animal models of pulmonary hypertension or scleroderma, or what we observe clinically in other disease states that are related potentially to scleroderma…