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Dr. Scott Canna is a pediatric oncologist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He also just finished researching “Defining and Testing the Hyperinflammatory Immune Synapse” which was partially funded by a seed grant from the Association in 2022. The paper for which can be found here.

Time in the Specialty: Immunologically, I “cut my teeth” helping study patients with a genetic inflammatory disease called NOMID as a medical student. It was an incredibly exciting and formative experience. I entered residency knowing I wanted to keep learning about/from patients with excess inflammation. In reading out sepsis, all of the immunologic literature was focused on it being an excessive inflammatory response. But the patients with genetic diseases like NOMID almost never had anything that looked like sepsis. I helped care for a few patients with a subtype of HLH, called Macrophage Activation Syndrome, as the most severe manifestation of their underlying Systemic JIA. These patients seemed to bring it all together and I was very interested in trying to figure out what was driving their disease. I then pursued further clinical and immunology training in Philadelphia, in large part because of its strong MAS/HLH research community. It was another very exciting and formative training experience, this was right around the time when the first CART Cytokine Release Syndrome patients were being treated on campus. But it was the loss of one HLH patient during my fellowship that remains particularly haunting/motivating.

Mentor in the Field: I’ve moved a lot and been incredibly lucky in my mentorship throughout. Raphaela Goldbach-Mansky and Ed Behrens, in particular, have been generous mentors and advocates across more years than I care to list.It can be really joyful, despite the long hours and insane hoops we have to jump through, to answer this calling of applying the brain you’ve invested your whole life into improving into the task of learning new things that are both helpful to the patients in front of you and the many many more that you’ll never know about. That’s the career “happy place” they’ve shared with me, and that I try hard to share with the people in my lab and clinical practice. I don’t feel that old, but I’ve been around long enough to see some of the things my mentors and I have worked on change people’s lives in ways that our current trainees take for granted. Of course, there’s so much more work to do, and right now is a very dark time for research in the US, but I’m hopeful we’ll be able to rebuild and get back to work.

Hobbies outside of the Field: I won’t pretend to know anything about work/life balance: seeing patients and running a research program is easily two full-time jobs. But, I’m equally lucky in my personal life and try to spend as much quality time with my spouse and two awesome teenagers as I can. I also consider myself a “bicycle evangelist”, meaning I love bicycles and I think everyone else should too. I’ve been a year-round bike commuter for decades now. Recreationally, I love mountain biking. Philadelphia’s got miles of really great trails within city limits. It’s no mistake that I live ~5 miles from the hospital and ~2 miles from the trailheads of two different parks.