Lupus Research Alliance Congratulates NIH on 5-Year AMP Success

February 28, 2019

NEW YORK, NY. As a co-sponsor of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) public-private Accelerating Medicines Partnership (AMP), the Lupus Research Alliance is proud to share the project’s five-year achievements reported in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery.  In the article, NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins points to new technology standards AMP created for studying the diseased cells responsible for lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.

The joint rheumatoid arthritis and lupus initiative focused on the massive job of procuring, storing and analyzing the tissues that are affected by each autoimmune disease. In lupus, researchers have already collected 150 biopsy samples of kidney tissue from patients with lupus nephritis for analysis of individual cells using state of the art scientific approaches. Importantly, the consortium has also collected blood and urine samples from the biopsied patients providing an unprecedented opportunity to compare, at such a large scale, biologic signatures in the kidney and in the periphery. This will enable critical biomarker studies that should inform patient care and drug development.

The AMP RA/Lupus initiative has received an additional, sixth, year of funding from its partners to maximize the analysis of this essential sample collection using emerging technologies. Several publications have already emerged with others to follow.

The Lupus Research Alliance is particularly pleased to see this substantial progress as one of the most prominent non-profit funding partners of the AMP RA/Lupus arm.  The organization contributed nearly half ($500,000) of the $1.2 million non-profit funding for the first five years of the project and maintains a comparably high level of support to continue the initiative for the sixth year.

“The Accelerating Medicines Partnership (AMP) is a public-private partnership between the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), multiple biopharmaceutical and life science companies and non-profit organizations to transform the current model for developing new diagnostics and treatments by jointly identifying and validating promising biological targets for therapeutics.”

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