Two Teams Led by Drs. Deepak Rao and Alexandra-Chloe Villani and by Dr. Caroline Jefferies Will Explore Disease Heterogeneity, Looking Closer at Biomarkers and Treatment Response
NEW YORK, Jan. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Today, the Lupus Research Alliance, the world’s largest private funder of lupus research, announced the 2025 Global Team Science (GTSA) Award recipients to two teams of multidisciplinary experts. The GTSA program – the organization’s largest multi-year grant – aims to support interdisciplinary, collaborative, and highly synergistic projects that focus on the molecular understanding of lupus and how the disease shows up in individuals to bring about breakthroughs in lupus treatments.
Lupus is a complex, chronic autoimmune disease affecting millions of people worldwide. The GTSA program awards $3 million for up to three years to each team. Selected from a rigorous review process, both projects push the boundaries of innovation, using cutting-edge technologies to address critical questions that could lead to advances in lupus research, drug development, and care.
“We are thrilled to recognize two teams of exceptional researchers with our Global Team Science Award for their innovative projects investigating the drivers of lupus heterogeneity,” said Mara Lennard Richard, PhD, Scientific Program Officer at the Lupus Research Alliance. “These collaborative research efforts are critical and will bring us closer to advancing personalized treatments for people living with lupus and a future where every patient receives the therapy best suited to their needs.”
The newest GTSA awards will fund research intended to advance personalized treatment for people with lupus and are led by:
- Deepak Rao, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Medicine and Co-Director of the Brigham Women’s Health Center for Cellular Profiling; and Alexandra-Chloe Villani, PhD, Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Investigator and Director of the Single-Cell Genomics Program within the Center for Immunology and Inflammatory Diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital
- While several medications are available to treat SLE, since each person is affected differently, predicting which treatment will be effective remains a challenge. There are currently no biomarker tests available to help predict which medication is most likely to help each patient. Drs. Rao and Villani and their team aim to understand how common SLE and cutaneous medications alter immune cell activity by analyzing blood and tissue samples before and after treatment using advanced cutting-edge technologies to identify markers that correlate with treatment responses. The goal is to develop simple tools that would enable doctors to personalize lupus treatment, increasing the likelihood of prescribing the most effective medication for each patient.
- Caroline Jefferies, PhD, Professor in the Kao Autoimmunity Institute and Division of Rheumatology and Scientific Director of the Center for Research in Women’s Health Science at Cedars-Sinai
- Studies suggest that when mitochondria, the cell’s energy producers, become stressed, they send signals that amplify interferon responses – a key driver of autoimmunity. This stress may also interfere with the molecular processes associated with X chromosomes, which could help explain why lupus affects women more often than men. Building on previous findings, Dr. Jefferies and her team will explore how mitochondrial stress and DNA regulation fuel inflammation and disease severity. The insights gained will help explain why patients differ so much in disease progression and response to treatment, paving the way for the development of more personalized therapies.
Established in 2020, the GTSA program has assembled multiple global teams of preeminent researchers. One study published last year led by 2022 GTSA recipient Dr. Martin Kriegel showed that certain bacteria in the gut can escape and stimulate immune cells in lupus. They demonstrated that this mechanism can be blocked by hydroxychloroquine, a commonly used drug for lupus. By identifying how gut microbes escape and incite inflammation, researchers have opened the door to developing therapies that target these specific bacterial triggers.
To learn more about the GTSA program and the projects the Lupus Research Alliance is funding, visit here.
About Lupus
Lupus is a chronic, complex autoimmune disease that affects millions of people worldwide. In lupus, the immune system, meant to defend against infections, produces autoantibodies that mistake the body’s own cells as foreign, causing other immune cells to attack organs such as the kidneys, brain, heart, lungs, and skin, as well as blood and joints. Ninety percent of people with lupus are women, most often diagnosed between the ages of 15-45. Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian and Pacific Islander people are disproportionately affected by lupus.
About the Lupus Research Alliance
The Lupus Research Alliance is the largest non-governmental, non-profit funder of lupus research worldwide. The organization aims to transform treatment by funding the most innovative lupus research, fostering scientific talent, and driving discovery toward better diagnostics, improved treatments, and a cure for lupus. Because the Lupus Research Alliance’s Board of Directors funds all administrative and fundraising costs, 100% of all donations goes to support lupus research programs.
For more information or to donate to lupus research, visit the LRA at LupusResearch.org and on social media at: X, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
SOURCE Lupus Research Alliance
