Meng Pan, MD, PhD

Vice Chair, Department of Dermatology, Ruijin Hospital

Dr. Meng Pan serves as Vice Chair of Department of Dermatology at Rui Jin Hospital, affiliated with Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, and Vice President of Society of Dermatology of the Shanghai Medical Association.

She received her MD degree from Shanghai Second Medical University in 1993 and her PhD degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2006. Dr. Pan was a Postdoc Fellow at Yale University School of Medicine from 2001 to 2003. She also joined at Department of Dermatology in University of Pennsylvania as a visiting scholar in 2013. She focuses on clinical and basic research of bullous dermatoses. Her research on pemphigus has received four successive fundings from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC No.30300306, 30771932, 81171499, 81472875). She has also received the recognition for her research from the Municipality of Shanghai and the Dermatology Fellowship Award from Milstein Medical Asian American Partnership Foundation. Dr Pan was sponsored at working on the interesting and promising project “Anti-desmoglein B cell clones in pemphigus patients in remission after anti-CD20 therapy”.

Pemphigus is an autoimmune disease, characterized by intraepidermal blistering of the skin and mucous membranes. The disease is mediated by pathogenic but not nonpathogenic autoantibodies in the blood from patients. These antibodies mainly target desmogleins (Dsgs), a critical glycoprotein found predominantly in the skin epidermis. Passive transfer of anti-Dsg3 antibody into neonatal mice could induce the disease, a milestone work in exploring the pemphgius pathophysiology. Conversely, removal of the autoantibodies from the sera prevents the induction of pemphigus in vivo. Therefore, the specific autoantibodies are necessary and sufficient for development of pemphigus. Dr Pan worked on establishing the novel technique on detecting specific anti-Dsg1/Dsg3 antibody to evaluate the disease activity and further to estimate the disease prognosis. Recently, she tried to explore the proteomics of autoantibody from the pemphigus patients to confirm whether the anti-Dsg B cell clones encode the circulating immunoglobulins.