Common Mechanisms of Autoimmunity Insight Awards

Funding for novel one-year pilot studies to investigate the mechanisms underlying autoimmune diseases, with the objective of identifying novel targets or mechanisms of autoimmune pathogenesis, validating therapeutic targets, or providing proof of concept for an innovative therapeutic strategy.

Breakthrough T1D, Lupus Research Alliance and the National Multiple Sclerosis Society have established a new joint research initative – Common Mechanisms in Autoimmunity Initiative – to support research to develop insight into the common mechanisms driving autoimmune diseases and accelerate the advancement of novel therapeutic strategies.

The initiative focuses on investigating the underlying commonalities of autoimmune diseases and aims to encourage and support research and collaboration across disciplines and research areas to combine resources, reduce redundant scientific enquiry and accelerate the rate of research and discovery to overcome the challenges of developing therapies and potential cures for multiple autoimmune diseases.

The common approaches shared by individual autoimmune disease research fields suggests the presence of common mechanisms and overlapping disease pathogenesis, drug targets and the possibility of shared therapeutic agents or modalities. An incomplete knowledge of immune networks, pathways, disease pathogenesis and heterogeneity across multiple autoimmune diseases presents a significant challenge towards developing optimal therapies, effective clinical trial design and predicting efficacy of treatments.

The Insight Awards will support research that targets the identified knowledge gaps and will obtain more specific insights into the commonalities and differences of immune pathways that govern autoimmune disease processes and lay the groundwork for bringing together investigators from across autoimmune fields and disciplines.

The awards will fund novel one-year pilot studies to investigate the mechanisms underlying autoimmune diseases, identify novel targets or mechanisms of autoimmune pathogenesis, validate therapeutic targets, or provide proof of concept for an innovative therapeutic strategy.

Proposals can include any project that focuses on:

• Establishing proof of concept for a hypothesised mechanism driving pathogenesis across multiple autoimmune diseases.
• Establishing proof of concept for a particular immune pathway common to multiple autoimmune diseases as a potential therapeutic target.

All project proposals should be relevant to multiple autoimmune diseases, and must incorporate at least two of the diseases represented by the founders of the initiative (multiple sclerosis, systemic lupus erythematosus (or one of its manifestations), and type 1 diabetes). Projects should be designed to establish a proof of concept to a future expanded collaborative study and should constitute the first step of a larger research endeavour.

Priority consideration will be given to research proposals that:

• Seek to provide proof of concept for the repurposing of an approved drug or therapy from one autoimmune disease into related autoimmune diseases.
• Seek mechanistic understanding of shared and different therapeutic responses among autoimmune diseases.
• Identify and validate biomarkers of disease progression, therapeutic response or predictive biomarkers using human samples that are applicable to multiple autoimmune diseases.
• Utilise primary human samples or reuse data from previously analysed human samples.
• Investigate and compare/contrast heterogeneity across multiple autoimmune diseases, especially with use of large, shared and/or harmonised data sets.
• Conduct multi-omics analysis of common and distinct immune pathways among multiple autoimmune diseases.
• Establish a protocol or SOP for best practices in information sharing and collaboration across autoimmune diseases, including how samples should be collected, and how data should be collected and analysed to facilitate optimal analysis of commonalities and differences of autoimmune diseases.

Projects should be designed to provide proof-of-concept data that can be used for the downstream development of larger, multi-year collaborative projects if successful.