Patricia-Jane Vonna Giardina, M.D. is Chief of the Division of Pediatric Hematology/Oncology at the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital (NYPH) and Professor of Clinical Pediatrics at the Weill Cornell Medical College (WCMC).
She is the Director of the Thalassemia program at the NYPH-WCMC since 1978 which provides comprehensive care and psychosocial services with genetic counseling to over one hundred patients and their families per year.
She graduated from New York Medical College and received her undergraduate training at Vassar College. She completed her rotating internship at Lenox Hill Hospital and pediatric residency and fellowship in pediatric hematology and oncology at the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center.
Dr. Giardina has contributed widely to the increased understanding and management of Thalassemia within the United States and abroad. She has contributed to the early sequencing of the beta globin gene, helped to identify multiple beta globin gene mutations and pioneered prenatal DNA diagnosis at NYPH-WCMC. Dr. Giardina organized the first bone marrow transplant for Thalassemia in New York in 1983 at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) and initiated the first in-utero bone marrow transplant in 1995.
Dr. Giardina is an invited speaker at national and international conferences on thalassemia and assists in the direction of new NIH Thalassemia research endeavors. Since 2002 she has organized and conducted the Annual WMC sponsored Continuing Medical Educational Conferences on Thalassemia management strategies for hematologists and other health professionals.
She is currently conducting NIH sponsored and clinical research trials on DMHP, S-DFO and GT56 in collabration with Robert Grady, PhD and participating in the world-wide trial of ICL670, all potential new iron chelators for the treatment of Thalassemia. She is collaborating with Stefano Rivella, PhD on curative gene transfer studies in the Thalassemia mouse model.
Under the direction of Dr. Patricia Giardina, the NYPH-WCMC Thalassemia Program has played a significant role in the scientific advances and improved management of thalassemia. During the past three decades, thalassemia has been transformed from a fatal disorder to a chronic illness, a select few with a familial HLA match can be cured by bone marrow transplant, the search for an oral iron chelator may be near fruition and the hope for a cure with gene therapy is feasible.
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