Center for
Global Health

Scholar

Languages: English

BIO STATEMENT

Dr. Behrens is a pediatric rheumatologist at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and Professor of Pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at The University of Pennsylvania. His laboratory seeks to understand the immunobiology of "cytokine storm syndromes", runaway immune responses that lead to organ failure and death. Many emerging and re-emerging viral infections a common causes of cytokine storm across the globe and account for significant morbidity and mortality. The Behrens lab seeks to bring modern immune profiling technologies to the typically under resourced global regions where these diseases are common in order to characterize why these immune responses occur. This in turn has the potential to lead to better diagnostics, and most important interventional therapeutics to reduce the burden of viral induced cytokine storm syndrome world-wide.

Recent Global Health Projects

1) Immunobiology of Dengue virus in the Dominican Republic - Partnership with multiple institutions in the DR to collect biosample and clinical data on children with DENV infection to understand the immunology that predicts severe response.

2) Training of local scientists on peripheral blood cell preparation and storage - A limiting factor for performing high-quality immunophenotyping of diseases in many global settings is the availability of a local scientific team to perform the technical preparation of human samples for downstream analysis. In collaboration with CHOP's Global Health Center, I trained a team of scientists in the Universidad del Central Este in the Dominican Republic the techniques required to isolate and freeze peripheral blood mononuclear cells from human blood samples.

Select Publications

McCuaig S, Gallagher M, Soto Albrecht YE, Acosta F, Turbi-Cornielle S, Soriano R, Gonzalez-Diaz E, Sanchez V, Herrera E, Cornielle A, Fernandez A, LaMonte A, Henrickson SE, Vella L, Steenhoff AP, Behrens E. Serum proteomic and single-cell RNA sequencing analysis reveals macrophage activation syndrome physiology and widespread complement dysregulation are associated with severe dengue infection in a pediatric cohort [abstract]. Arthritis Rheumatol. 2025;77(suppl 9). Available at: https://acrabstracts.org/abstract/serum-proteomic-and-single-cell-rna-sequencing-analysis-reveals-macrophage-activation-syndrome-physiology-and-widespread-complement-dysregulation-are-associated-with-severe-dengue-infection-in-a-pedia/

Last Updated: 24 April 2026