- Associate Professor, Department of Pediatrics (Rheumatology), Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia / University of Pennsylvania
Dr. Scott Canna is Associate Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Rheumatology at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, with a faculty appointment at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his undergraduate degree from Johns Hopkins University, his MD from the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, completed pediatrics residency at the University of Colorado, pediatric rheumatology fellowship at CHOP, and postdoctoral training at the NIH National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS) before returning to Philadelphia as faculty in 2021.
The Canna laboratory studies autoinflammatory and hyperinflammatory disease, with particular focus on the biology of the inflammasome-activated cytokine IL-18 and its role in macrophage activation syndrome (MAS). His group discovered gain-of-function NLRC4 mutations that cause a distinct autoinflammatory syndrome with extraordinary IL-18 elevation, work published in Nature Genetics that opened a new disease category and a new therapeutic axis.
Dr. Canna provides clinical care within the CHOP Immune Dysregulation Program and is a senior member of the Penn Colton Center for Autoimmunity, the Institute for Immunology and Immune Health, and the Penn-CHOP pediatric rheumatology community. His work has helped establish IL-18 blockade as a rational therapeutic strategy for severe inflammatory disease.