Congress has now provided nearly 5 million dollars in new funding for lupus research through the DoD.

Dr. Steve Tomlinson, Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, and Dr. Betty Diamond, Chief of the Autoimmune Disease Center for the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research at the North Shore Medical Center in Manhasset, New York, each have been awarded grants of more than $1 million.

Dr. Tomlinson's team at MUSC, which includes Dr. Gary Gilkeson, Co-Principal Investigator and Dr. Hideharu Sekine, Co-Investigator, will use a mouse model of lupus to determine if targeting a certain cascade of proteins, known as the complement system, with a treatment that might target itself selectively to areas of the body where lupus is actively causing tissue damage can be a safer and more effective therapy for lupus, by minimizing immune suppression in the rest of the body. If the studies are successful, human studies can begin which may lead to safer and more effective treatments for lupus.

Dr. Diamond's lab at North Shore Medical Center will study the hormone estrogen to see what role it plays in triggering lupus disease activity in some mouse models but not others. Hormones are suspected of contributing to the gender disparity of lupus, which strikes mostly young women, although the question of which hormones affect which subsets of patients in which manner remains unanswered. Understanding the details of how this works in some mice, which leaving other mice unaffected may lead to better ways to test patients with lupus for hormonal disorders and develop new was to control the disease through hormonal regulation.

Lupus is a complicated, potentially life-threatening inflammatory illness which can flare up without warning and may have unpredictable effects on different patients. The LFA successfully advocated in 2005 to have lupus biomarkers included in the peer-reviewed research program. Biomarkers are tests, which need to be developed which could help to simplify the understanding of this complex illness and provide signposts for a more rational approach to treat it. With effective biomarkers, patients could be selected in advance who are more likely to respond to specific kinds of treatments, and during treatment, the same biomarkers could be used to guide the dosing and the timing of treatments, to optimize their effectiveness and minimize side effects.

There has not been a new FDA approved treatment for lupus in more than 40 years and many of the existing treatments for lupus are toxic and can suppress the immune system too much, putting patients at risk for serious infections. Many targeted immune-modulating agents are being considered for testing in this disease, but the complexity of the illness and the difficulty in tracking outcomes raise barriers to the process. The development of new biomarkers for lupus could have profound benefits in obtaining FDA approval for new safer and more effective therapies, not only by providing the sophisticated level of guidance needed so that these agents will work optimally, but also by simultaneously providing objective measurements to demonstrate if the new treatment is working. More targeted therapies, or even better biomarkers to guide existing treatments, will allow physicians to treat lupus while avoiding the sometimes devastating side effects caused by current methods used to control the disease.

In addition to successfully advocating to obtain funding from DoD medical research program for lupus biomarkers, the LFA has provided $600,000 in direct support to 10 research institutions around the nation for creating a unique repository for patient samples and clinical information to support studies to validate new lupus biomarkers in human studies.