Winter 2020’s Awards, Appointments & Announcements in Rheumatology

Lupus Insight Prize

Ignacio Sanz, MD, Mason Lowance Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics, and chief of the Division of Rheumatology at Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, was awarded the $100,000 2019 Lupus Insight Prize by the Lupus Research Alliance on June 19 at the 19th Annual Meeting of the Federation of Clinical Immunology Societies in Boston. Established in 2016—a merger of the Alliance for Lupus Research, the Lupus Research Institute and the SLE Foundation—the Lupus Research Alliance was created to improve treatments for lupus while advancing toward a cure.

The Lupus Insight Prize recognizes a major, novel insight or discovery that has the potential to change the paradigm by which we understand lupus and lead to further advances in its diagnosis and treatment. Researchers know that B cells have a role in activation of destructive antibodies. Dr. Sanz and his team are noted for description of a pathway of B cell activation that was well known in mouse models, but had not been well defined in human immune responses.

“Over a period of years,” Dr. Sanz explains, “we followed these B cells that you do not see in normal immune responses. Eventually we understood that they were part of a particular pathway of activation called the extra-follicular pathway, because this does not happen inside the germinal centers.”

In a series of papers over the past few years, Dr. Sanz and colleagues described the components of that pathway and the molecular mechanism that induces the epigenetic regulation of the naive B cells and their resulting contribution to lupus.¹

Dr. Sanz formerly conducted his research at the University of Rochester, N.Y. He notes that the demographics of the catchment area for his present appointment at Emory entails access to a larger group of patients who are disproportionately affected by lupus—African Americans. The Georgia Lupus Registry, for which his colleague Sung Lim, MD, MPH, is the principal investigator, “provides a unique opportunity here to really be able to understand this disease,” says Dr. Sanz.

The Lupus Insight Prize is especially rewarding, Dr. Sanz says, because it is a testament to the research community’s recognition of his contribution to how we think about SLE. 

Gretchen Henkel is a health and medical journalist based in California.

Reference

1. Jenks SA, Cashman KS, Zumaquero E, et al. Distinct effector B cells induced by unregulated toll-like receptor 7 contribute to pathogenic responses in systemic lupus erythematosus. Immunity. 2018;49:725–739.e6.