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Immunologist Deepak Rao wins 2025 Lupus Insight Prize
The $100,000 prize honors research with potential to significantly advance the understanding and treatment of lupus.
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Malvika Choudhary - Sat, 05, Jul 2025
- 15:54 EDT
- 21
Deepak Rao / Lupus Research Alliance
The Lupus Research Alliance (LRA) awarded the 2025 Lupus Insight Prize to Indian origin immunologist Deepak Rao for his discoveries uncovering the drivers of immune imbalance in lupus.
Rao, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, was recognized for findings published in Nature that identify a critical disruption in immune signaling involving the proteins AHR and JUN.
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This imbalance reduces protective Th22 cells and allows harmful T peripheral helper (Tph) and T follicular helper (Tfh) cells to expand, intensifying inflammation in people with lupus, a chronic autoimmune disease that affects millions globally.
"We're starting to understand the core features of the immune response that gets activated in lupus," said 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."
The study, conducted in collaboration with Jaehyuk Choi of University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, also points to the therapeutic potential of targeting interferon signals with drugs like anifrolumab or restoring AHR signaling to correct the immune imbalance.
“One of our next steps is to understand whether activating the aryl hydrocarbon receptor can help correct this imbalance in T cell responses,” Rao said. “We’re hopeful this will give us a new set of strategies to bring the immune system back to a state of balance.”
He added that the research could also improve diagnostics and help assess the effectiveness of treatments. “It helps us with a set of tools that may more efficiently identify who has lupus and who doesn’t.”
Teodora Staeva, chief scientific officer at the LRA, called the discovery “a critical piece of the immune system’s dysfunction in lupus,” adding that it “brings us one step closer to targeted therapies that can restore balance.”
Acknowledging the patients who contributed to the study, Rao said, “These studies depend on collaboration between patients, physicians, and scientists. To be included among the past recipients of this prize — many of whom are my heroes — is incredibly humbling.”
Rao earned his bachelor of science from Harvard University and his doctor of medicine and doctorate in immunology from Yale School of Medicine.
Presented at the Federation of Clinical Immunology Societies (FOCIS) annual meeting in Boston, the $100,000 prize honors research with the potential to significantly advance the understanding and treatment of lupus.
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