Yukiko Kimura

Dr. Yukiko Kimura is the Division Chief of Pediatric Rheumatology at the Joseph M. Sanzari Children’s Hospital at Hackensack University Medical Center and Professor of Pediatrics at the Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine. Dr. Kimura is a clinical researcher and is a founding member of the Childhood Arthritis and Rheumatology Research Alliance (CARRA), a North America-wide pediatric rheumatology research network with over 100 sites and over 500 members. She has held a number of CARRA leadership positions including President, Executive Committee member, JIA Research Committee Chair, Co-Chair of the CARRA Registry and Research Oversight Committee (RROC) and co-PI of the CARRA Registry. Dr. Kimura was responsible for co-leading the establishment of the CARRA Registry for pediatric rheumatic diseases, which has enrolled almost 15,000 patients to date, and led to multiple research studies and publications. Dr. Kimura led the development of the consensus treatment plans (CTPs) for systemic JIA and polyarticular JIA, and is the principal investigator for two CARRA multi-center studies of CARRA CTPs for children and adolescents with new onset polyarticular JIA (STOP-JIA) and systemic JIA (FROST), which are continuing to provide long-term outcomes and new insights into how early treatment can change outcomes in JIA. She is a leader of a new international (CARRA-PReS) randomized controlled trial of treatments in polyarticular JIA patients who fail a TNF inhibitor. In addition, she is the co-PI of a newly NIH-funded CARRA registry project that will prospectively assess the case definition, disease progression, biomarkers, and patient reported outcomes in systemic JIA patients with a recently identified and potentially fatal complication of lung disease.