With nearly three years’ experience as President and CEO of the Lupus Research Alliance (LRA), Albert T. Roy is exactly where he was meant to be—seeing the fruits of LRA’s research investments and the translation to patient clinical care. Under his leadership, the LRA continues to be committed to providing meaningful updates to members of the lupus community.

This Q&A is one way to give a glimpse into the advancements that LRA donors and friends can expect to see come to fruition in 2025.

Looking to the months ahead, is there specific research that holds great promise for people living with lupus?

AR: There are many, but I’d highlight a new treatment paradigm for lupus known as engineered cell therapies—the process of harnessing a person’s own immune system to better fight disease in their body through what is being called an “immune-reset.”

Engineered cell therapies, such as CD19-targeted chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cells, could be a turning point in treating and potentially curing lupus. In fact, LRA funded the seminal research that enabled the first clinical case study in Germany which showed a complete remission among multiple lupus patients treated with this type of therapy. We’re especially excited by this finding because the patients who received this therapy had not responded to previous treatments.

How will Lupus Nexus improve the quality of life for people with lupus?

AR: The Lupus Nexus aims to transform lupus drug discovery and development. This revolutionary resource will provide an unparalleled research platform for the collection, exchange, and analysis of

highly curated clinical data, patient-reported data, and biological samples to allow for global collaboration, research innovation, and precision medicine approaches in lupus.

And we’re looking to make this information available to the lupus community—including the biopharmaceutical industry and researchers. Our goal is to build a platform with the potential to illuminate new biomarkers of disease progression, better understand the differences in disease presentation and patient outcomes, and bring the field of lupus research another step closer to personalized medicine.

Will the LRA continue to build upon its pioneering research that illuminated the ways gut health and autoimmunity are linked?

AR: The simple answer is yes. Over the past decade, the LRA has funded a number of investigations that revealed that certain gut bacteria may trigger autoimmune responses—providing a rationale for further exploration. This year the LRA and our clinical affiliate Lupus Therapeutics have expanded our research in this regard to the clinic and allocated funding to a new initiative IDEAL (Investigate Dietary Approaches for Lupus)—the first-of-its-kind effort to fund a well-controlled pilot clinical study to evaluate the impact of diet and the gut microbiome on the lived experience of lupus.

For years our patient community has wondered if diet can help with lupus symptoms as dietary interventions have shown promise in other autoimmune diseases. The LRA is in a unique position to help answer this question by contributing to the body of scientific evidence and share our findings with the lupus and research communities.

For more information on each of these initiatives—and more groundbreaking work being conducted by the LRA, read 2025: Pursuing Bold Scientific Discovery