LRA Awards 2025 Lupus Insight Prize to Dr. Deepak Rao for Uncovering Key Drivers of Immune Imbalance in Lupus

BOSTON, June 25, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- The Lupus Research Alliance (LRA) proudly awarded the 2025 Lupus Insight Prize today to highly respected immunologist Deepak Rao, MD, PhD, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. The Prize recognizes Dr. Rao's pioneering and widely reported findings published in Nature, which reveal a previously unknown imbalance in key immune cells that contribute to lupus. The study sheds light on how this imbalance arises and identifies a potential target for restoring immune system regulation in people with the disease.

Dr. Rao was honored today at the Federation of Clinical Immunology Societies (FOCIS) 2025 meeting in Boston, Massachusetts, in a ceremony chaired by Gary Koretzky, MD, PhD, Weill Cornell Medicine, and Co-Chair of the LRA Research Committee of the Board of Directors. The prestigious $100,000 Lupus Insight Prize is presented to outstanding investigators who have made significant scientific breakthroughs in the last five years that advance the understanding of lupus and have the potential to drive new lupus treatments.

"We're starting to understand the core features of the immune response that gets activated in lupus," noted Dr. Rao. "The Lupus Insight Prize will allow us to continue to identify key signals and pathways that drive the damaging immune response. We hope to use this knowledge to design new strategies to rebalance the immune system in patients with lupus to suppress damaging pathways and promote protective ones."

AHR and JUN: Newly Discovered Drivers of Immune Imbalance in Lupus

Lupus is driven by an overactive immune system that mistakenly targets a person's own cells and tissues. Dr. Rao's research focuses on two types of immune cells—T peripheral helper (Tph) and T follicular helper (Tfh) cells—that help B cells produce antibodies. In close collaborative work between Dr. Rao and Dr. Jaehyuk Choi, MD PhD, a dermatologist and immunologist at UT Southwestern, Drs. Rao and Choi found that in lupus, these B-helper T cells are abnormally abundant, while another type of T cell, called Th22, is reduced. This imbalance contributes to excessive B cell activation and inflammation.

Their research identified a key factor behind this shift: a regulatory pathway involving the proteins AHR and JUN. Normally, AHR and JUN help maintain a balance between these T cell types, preventing excessive immune activation. However, in lupus, inflammatory signals—particularly from interferons—disrupt this regulation, reducing the number of protective Th22 cells and allowing harmful B-helper T cells to dominate.

By pinpointing this mechanism, the study results suggest that restoring AHR-JUN signaling could help rebalance the immune system and reduce lupus-related inflammation. This discovery provides a promising new direction for therapeutic development.

"The Lupus Insight Prize recognizes discoveries that have the power to change the course of lupus research," said Teodora Staeva, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer at the LRA. "Dr. Rao's work has uncovered a critical piece of the immune system's dysfunction in lupus, bringing us one step closer to targeted therapies that can restore balance."

Hear from Dr. Deepak Rao

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 ultimately 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, please visit the LRA at LupusResearch.org and on social media at: X, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

SOURCE Lupus Research Alliance