NEW YORK – The nonprofit Lupus Research Alliance and its affiliate Lupus Therapeutics on Tuesday announced a study to speed development of personalized treatments for the chronic autoimmune disease.
The five-year prospective, observational Lupus Landmark Study will involve 3,500 patients diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus in North America. Later this year, the organizations will begin recruiting patients into the study at academic medical centers within Lupus Therapeutics' Lupus Clinical Investigators Network. Investigators will expand the recruitment effort in 2024.
The Lupus Research Alliance funds efforts to study and develop better treatments for the autoimmune disease globally, and Lupus Therapeutics partners with biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies on advancing new drugs and diagnostics for people with the condition.
The Lupus Landmark Study is the first phase of the Lupus Research Alliance's registry and biorepository Lupus Nexus, which it is developing as a research resource for drug discovery and development. Lupus Nexus will encompass clinical data, patient-reported data, and biological samples. Investigators will use de-identified data from the Landmark Study and data from analyzed biological samples in Lupus Nexus to validate drug targets, biomarkers, and their hypotheses about the underlying mechanisms of lupus, which in turn may improve the understanding of the disease and help develop better diagnostic, prognostic, and treatment interventions.
"My hope is that with the Lupus Landmark Study and the Lupus Nexus, we'll not only have better data, but we'll be able to better collaborate to find more treatments that will enable more personalized care for people with lupus," Sam Lim, lead investigator of the Lupus Landmark Study and a professor of medicine at Emory University, said in a statement.
The Lupus Landmark Study and Lupus Nexus has received sponsorship support from Bristol Myers Squibb, GSK, AbbVie, and EMD Serono.