In the second of our articles on lupus, PME spoke to Albert Roy, President and CEO the Lupus Research Alliance, about how current research could enable standards of care to move from suppressing the immune system to centre on targeted, disease-modifying therapies.
What’s driving the shift from broad immunosuppression to precision approaches in lupus, and why now?
Albert Roy (AR): For decades, lupus treatment relied on broadly suppressing the immune system. Today, that’s changing. Advances in immunology, genetics and biomarkers are finally allowing us to understand lupus at a molecular level and identify the specific immune pathways – particularly B-cell–driven processes – that fuel inflammation and organ damage. That clarity has opened the door to more targeted therapy approaches that can intervene without depleting the entire immune system.
The timing also matters. For more than 50 years, there were virtually no breakthroughs in lupus-specific treatments – but a lot of work was happening behind the scenes that, in many ways, was driven by the research enabled by the Lupus Research Alliance. In the past five years, we have seen an unprecedented acceleration in lupus drug development, including multiple new approvals, late-stage programmes and regulatory momentum. This convergence of better science, smarter clinical trial design and renewed industry investment represents a true inflection point – one where precision medicine is no longer theoretical, but increasingly achievable for people living with lupus.
Read the article in full here.
