The UCSF-led Sjögren’s International Collaborative Clinical Alliance (SICCA) held an Investigators’ Meeting in Athens on September 28, 2011, prior to the International Symposium on Sjögren's Syndrome. The majority of SICCA Research Group Directors and investigators, and some clinical coordinators attended the meeting and are seen on this picture.  SICCA currently includes nine Research Groups, located in Beijing, Buenos Aires, Copenhagen, Madurai, Kanazawa, London, Philadelphia, Baltimore and San Francisco. The project is directed by UCSF professors Lindsey Criswell and Caroline Shiboski and is supported by a ten-year NIDCR/NEI grant. The Alliance has been working toward establishing standardized classification criteria for this disease and building an international registry of uniform clinical data and biospecimens that are available to scientists all over the world, with the intent of furthering the understanding of Sjögren’s syndrome and ultimately of treating it. The new classification criteria developed by the SICCA group was recently approved by the American College of Rheumatology. SICCA is a multidisciplinary effort that includes dentists (oral medicine and oral pathology specialists), ophthalmologists, rheumatologists, a geneticist, an epidemiologist, and statisticians.

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SICCA Investigators meeting held in San Francisco in May 2009.