Invited Faculty
  • Joan Merrill
    Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation
    USA
  • Joan T Merrill, M.D. is a Member of the Oklahoma Research Foundation and OMRF Professor of Medicine at the University of Oklahoma. She initiated and led the Oklahoma Lupus Cohort for more than 20 years building a collection of serial clinical assessments and blood samples of more than 600 participants with SLE. She has been the Principal Investigator for many pharmaceutical sponsored clinical trials in lupus and initiated a number of investigator-led studies to test aspects of clinical trial design in support of improving the interpretability of lupus trials, working closely with Drs. James and Guthridge at OMRF to integrate high quality clinical data with informative immunologic characterization of patients. She is currently the protocol chair for an NIH-sponsored multicenter study of MMF vs MMF plus voclosporin in patients without nephritis, enabling the reduction in background medications for a better assessment of immunologic differences between patients who do or do not improve on MMF alone or when voclosporin is added. She is a recognized expert in data quality for lupus trials and has over 320 publications in the field of lupus.
    Research & Clinical Focus

    SLE

    Clinical Trials

    immunophenotypes and treatment response

    SLE outcome measures

    SLE trial design

    • Date Time Room Session Title Lecture Title
    May 19 13:00-13:20 Room Grand Ballroom 101 [Concurrent Session 6] New Treatments Precision medicine for lupus: Big problems but greater rewards