Victoria P. Werth MD

Dr. Victoria Werth is a Professor of Dermatology and Medicine, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and Chief of Dermatology, Philadelphia VAMC.  She is an internist and dermatologist with a practice devoted to autoimmune skin diseases.  She has guided development and validation of disease severity tools currently being used in lupus, dermatomyositis, and autoimmune blistering disease studies.  She is leading a multicenter collaborative, web-based database to collect prospective information on patients with skin and systemic manifestations of lupus erythematosus. This is the first systematic epidemiologic study of cutaneous lupus erythematosus in the United States. With the information collected on now over 350 patients at the University of Pennsylvania alone, we have performed the first prospective evaluations of cutaneous lupus erythematosus in order to assess disease severity, quality of life, and response to treatment, as well as complete validation studies of the CLASI, a disease severity tool for cutaneous lupus.  Her investigational laboratory studies relate to biomarkers in cutaneous lupus and ultraviolet light effects on skin. Recent studies have examined mechanistic effects of therapeutics in CLE, as well as subset-specific expression of interferon signatures.  Dr. Werth is a member of the Medical & Scientific Committee of the Lupus Foundation of America, Associate Editor for the Lupus Science & Medicine journal, and her research has been funded by the Alliance for Lupus Research, Lupus Foundation of America, Lupus Research Institute, NIH, and the VA.