The CIM faculty scholars program is a powerful way to help jumpstart the promising work of clinicians and researchers early in their careers. CIM Director David Hellmann has compared it to the McArthur “genius” award — “an investment in a person’s originality, insight and potential.”
Few have done more to realize that investment than CIM scholar Antoine Azar, whose mission when he joined the Hopkins faculty in 2015 as clinical director of the Division of Allergy and Clinical Immunology was to create a center of excellence dedicated to the understanding and treatment of an extremely difficult to diagnose complex of disorders known as adult PID (primary immunodeficiency disorders).
It’s a condition thought to impact one in 1,200 people, though Azar believes it is more common than people think, and that’s because it requires a lot of time and detective work — and specialized testing — to pinpoint the precise failure in the immune system a particular case represents. As many as 90% of PID cases have likely gone undiagnosed.
“I wanted to extend the knowledge of immunology in adults, and I wanted to create a home for patients living with adult PID,” he says.
Azar’s appointment in the spring of 2018 as the Tara & Richard Parker CIM Scholar afforded him the support he needed to make that dream a reality. Generous and ongoing support from Cindy and Bart McLean allowed Azar to enhance his clinical work and research, and help devise and explore additional therapies for many patients with atypical disorders affecting their immune systems.
Immediately after his appointment as a CIM scholar, Azar launched the Adult Primary Immunodeficiency Center of Excellence — one of the only centers of its kind — at the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. He secured space for a lab, and hired and trained a full-time nurse and nurse practitioner to work with patients who come from all over the world, often after years of struggling with infections and other symptoms that have defied diagnosis.
“We have learned so much about the immune system over the past 20 years, how it works, how it is affected by genetics and other factors.” – Antoine Azar
Today he works tirelessly to promote collaboration with other departments at Johns Hopkins Medicine — including rheumatology, pulmonology, neurology, otolaryngology and nephrology — whose specialists are often key in the diagnosis and treatment of adult PID. And he has traveled extensively to educate his fellow physicians within and outside of the allergy/immunology specialty.
“We have learned so much about the immune system over the past 20 years, how it works, how it is affected by genetics and other factors,” he says. It is easier now to tease out how and why a patient’s immune system is failing and to identify targeted therapies to treat them.
Azar was a primary investigator, for instance, on a study published in Blood in July 2024 describing a new targeted therapy, a pill recently approved by the FDA to treat a rare but extremely debilitating immunodeficiency disorder called WHIM syndrome.
“I am so proud and honored to be a CIM scholar,” Azar says.
