Member Spotlight: Lara Danziger-Isakov

Lara Danziger-Isakov, MD, MPH, FPIDS, is Associate Chair of Pediatrics and Professor at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and the University of Cincinnati. She earned her medical degree at Case Western Reserve University and her Master of Public Health at St. Louis University. Her residency was completed at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, and her pediatric infectious diseases fellowship at St. Louis Children’s Hospital and Washington University in St. Louis.

Dr. Danziger-Isakov has served PIDS on the Transplant ID Committee, Membership Committee, and Nominations and Awards Committee. She also contributed to the transplant section programming of the St. Jude/PIDS Pediatric Infectious Diseases Research Conference for several years.

Why pediatric ID? Choosing pediatric infectious diseases as my specialty was a gradual process. I had intended to be a general pediatrician with a community practice. During residency, I spent a significant amount of time exploring that pathway only to find I was drawn to the complexity of infectious diseases, its balance of acute and complex care, as well as chronic care. That spoke more to how I like to interact with patients and families. Gradually, I was drawn into the problem solving and the types of puzzles that pediatric ID allowed me to engage in. I was rather far along and later to the game than many people, I didn’t decide to do peds ID until the middle to end of my second year of residency, but I got there with intent and excitement.

Where have you taken your ID focus? I’m intently focused on immunocompromised host, which has been the focus of the entirety of my career. It is one of the extra things that drew me to pediatric ID: that niche population of organ transplant recipients as well as other immunocompromising conditions, because it added an additional layer of complexity. I got to think not only about diseases but also about the patient’s immune system and how that affected the presentation and response to disease.

Most recently, I have focused on two primary areas that continue to be highly important. The first is looking at cytomegalovirus epidemiology, prevention and treatment in solid organ transplant recipients. CMV has an acute impact with some potentially chronic complications. Through PIDTRAN (Pediatric Infectious Diseases Transplant Network), we have been able to explore some of these in both retrospective and prospective studies while investigating immune responses. The other has really become timelier and more urgent, though my colleague Amy Feldman at Colorado Children’s and others in PIDS and the Society of Pediatric Liver Transplantation (SPLIT) have worked on it for the past six or eight years. We have been looking at the introduction of live viral vaccines to expand our understanding of the safety and immunogenicity of vaccines like measles or varicella after solid organ transplant to protect our patients more effectively.

Our goal in transplant pediatric ID is always to ensure that patients and families that get a transplant get the chance to live their best lives. Hopefully, offering live viral vaccines after transplant will provide peace of mind as they engage with the world as fully as they’d like to.

What is a recent development in pediatric ID that you are working on? PIDS has been very supportive of our PIDTRAN work with LIVE VAC, the live vaccine group, in our consortium work and we have seen that have an impact on clinical practice. The work is ongoing and anyone looking to join or participate, especially as we expand to kidney and heart transplant recipients in the cohort, is welcome to contact us.

We can achieve so much more collaboratively than as individuals. PIDTRAN has provided an entryway for people to think more broadly about how to meaningfully engage with one another to create epidemiologic data in a very limited population. It is challenging work that highlights the value of collaboration across centers of all sizes. There is an abundance of talent and amazing ideas in our Society. Through PIDTRAN and similar efforts, we have the opportunity to have an impact on patients beyond our own individual institutions.

What do you enjoy most about being a PIDS member? What keeps you renewing your membership? Number one is the people. The ability to be part of a community of people passionate about improving the health of children, specifically in relation to infectious disease, is paramount. I enjoy that we share a collective focus because not one of us can be everything. I rely on PIDS to help move things forward so that we all benefit. Our collective power to push forward the importance of pediatric ID is essential, whether that is through education and training, advocacy, research, or any other equally important avenue. PIDS people care deeply about the other members of the Society and want to share and celebrate their successes. We are unique and it’s an exceptional experience to have professionally. I have benefitted from many, many people in PIDS and their unofficial mentorship, even if they didn’t realize that is what they were doing for me. I’m continually learning how to be better from the people I interact with in PIDS.