Scleroderma Center

Clinical Director

Dr. Domsic received her medical degree from the University of Iowa. She completed her internship and residency at Duke University Medical Center, and her rheumatology fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh. She subsequently finished a Master of Public Health degree at the University of Pittsburgh. She is board certified in Rheumatology.

Dr. Domsic’s clinical and research goal is to improve the care of the patient with Scleroderma.  In Dr. Domsic’s research she focuses on three primary areas: developing tools to help the clinician risk stratify patients for death or disease complications, improve clinical trial design, and improve the assessment and management of Raynaud phenomenon.     Her work developing easy-to-use tools to assess an individual patient’s risk for mortality or disease complication can be used by the clinician to counsel and manage patients, as well as by the researcher.  It is her hope that the projects she works on to improve  clinical trial design may help identify a medication to treat scleroderma.    In more recent years she has become increasingly interested in Raynaud phenomenon, as this is a significant symptom for nearly all patients with scleroderma.    She is interested in different types of vascular imaging and its relationship to Raynaud symptoms, as well as understanding if there are better ways to assess the severity of a patient’s Raynaud symptoms.     She is the principal investigator of an NIH-funded trial to evaluate the effect of atorvastatin (Lipitor) on Raynaud symptoms and blood vessel dysfunction.  This is an investigator-initiated trial only at the University of Pittsburgh.

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Dr. Torok is a graduate of the Pennsylvania State University of Medicine. She began her career in Pediatric Rheumatology as a Fellow at the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh (CHP) in 2006. Upon completion of her fellowship, she stayed at Children’s and became an Assistant Professor. She helped develop and now serves as director of the CHP Scleroderma Clinic which provides treatment for children with localized and systemic scleroderma. Along with treating patients, Dr. Torok has been involved in numerous research projects. She is the principal investigator of the National Registry for Childhood Onset Scleroderma (NRCOS), which serves as a national resource of longitudinal data on pediatric patients with this disease.

In addition she is involved in the Childhood Arthritis and Rheumatic Disease Research Alliance Network (CARRANet), a North American organization of pediatric rheumatologists who are committed to advancing the health and quality of life of children living with rheumatic diseases and arthritis including the various forms of scleroderma. They have joined together to answer critical research questions. Dr. Torok participates in a number of studies to further evaluate disease activity measurement in pediatric localized scleroderma, including clinical and laboratory parameters.

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Dr. Cristina Padilla is a board-certified clinical rheumatologist and post-doctoral research scholar. She received her medical degree at the University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas, Texas. She completed her residency program in Internal Medicine at the University of Rochester Medical Center/Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, New York before completing her Rheumatology fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Her clinical and research focus in scleroderma started prior to medical school and has led to multiple co-authored publications over the years. Dr. Padilla received the Eliot Goldings Rheumatology of the Year Award in 2016, selected for the Career Education and Enhancement for Health Care Research Diversity (CEED) program in 2021, and her research project chosen for presentation at the 17th International Workshop on Scleroderma in 2022.

Dr. Padilla studies lymphocytes in scleroderma associated interstitial lung disease (SSc-ILD), utilizing single cell sequencing technologies to enhance our understanding of the role of T cells and Natural Killer cells in disease development and progression. By understanding the pathogenesis behind inflammation and fibrosis in SSc-ILD, new targets can be discovered to develop effective therapies. As a physician of the Scleroderma Center, she is a strong advocate for integrating the clinical and research aspects of the Center in order to provide excellent scleroderma patient care. She sees scleroderma patients at the UPMC Falk Medical Building.

Dr. Medsger received his medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania. He completed his internship at Jackson Memorial Hospital, and his rheumatology fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh. He is board certified in Internal Medicine and Rheumatology.

Dr. Medsger’s research focuses on the epidemiology, clinical and laboratory features and natural history of systemic sclerosis (SSc) and localized forms of scleroderma (LScl), Raynaud disease and polymyositis/dermatomyositis. He and collaborators have described many serologic subsets of SSc and LScl, their distinctive clinical findings, survival and immunogenetic associations. He has developed a SSc disease severity index and has proposed criteria for the classification of early SSc. Current studies include cytokines and other soluble protein markers as SSc disease activity measures, lung transplantation, SSc in twins, and childhood onset SSc and LScl.

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Patrizia Fuschiotti, Ph.D., received her degree in pharmaceutical chemistry and her Ph.D. in the immunopharmacology of tumors at the State University of Perugia, Italy. She completed her postdoctoral training at the National Institutes of Health in the Laboratory of Immunology (NIAID) in Bethesda, Maryland, studying the immunogenetics of immunoglobulins. Subsequently, she joined the Laboratoire d’Immunochimie – Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (National Center for Scientific Research) in Grenoble, France, where she studied the T cells in newborns and adults. She then returned to the US, joining the Department of Immunology at the University of Pittsburgh in 2006 where she is currently an Assistant Professor of Immunology.

Dr. Fuschiotti’s research focuses on how T cells and their products contribute to fibrosis in systemic sclerosis (SSc). She joined forces with Dr. Medsger and the staff of the Scleroderma Center. Her research has shown that a certain type of T cells (CD8 positive cells) produce a substance (interleukin 13 or IL-13) which participates in fibrosis. In recognition of her work, Dr. Fuschiotti has received a Marta Marx Research Award from the national Scleroderma Foundation. She is currently studying how CD8 positive T cells and IL-13 are regulated at the molecular level in the blood and skin of SSc patients. Blocking the effects of IL-13 may be a treatment strategy to prevent fibrosis in SSc and other diseases characterized by fibrosis.

Dr. Anna Papazoglou received her medical degree from the University of Athens in Greece. She initially started her residency in Internal Medicine at Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Gothenburg in Sweden. She then relocated to the United States and worked as a research scholar at Immunogenetics Lab at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia. She completed her internship and residency at Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia, and her rheumatology fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh. Upon completion of her fellowship, she stayed at the University of Pittsburgh and joined Dr. Lafyatis’s lab. She is board certified in Internal Medicine and Rheumatology. Along with treating patients, Dr. Papazoglou’s research interest is systemic sclerosis- associated interstitial lung disease. Under Dr. Lafyatis mentorship, she initially worked on understanding the role of TNFSF18 expression as a marker of myofibroblasts in scleroderma skin. She subsequently published her research findings on epigenetic changes in macrophages in systemic sclerosis- associated interstitial lung disease. Her present research interest focuses on the study of biomarkers in systemic sclerosis- associated interstitial lung disease reflecting different pathological aspects of the disease.