Lupus Innovation Award

Lupus Innovation Award

Offers high-risk high-reward approaches to fundamental lupus research challenges through the Lupus Innovation Award.

The Lupus Innovation Award is a grant program of the Lupus Research Alliance (LRA) that supports high-risk, high-reward approaches to major unresolved challenges in lupus research. The LRA, a New York-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit (Federal Tax ID #58-2492913), has awarded more than $284 million across 675+ grants, with 100% of donated funds directed to research programs. The Innovation Award is distinguished from other LRA mechanisms by its explicit appetite for unconventional ideas — incremental or confirmatory research is not the target. The award places special emphasis on studies exploring fundamental lupus mechanisms, novel molecular targets and pathways, innovative technologies, and genuinely interdisciplinary approaches.

The award provides $300,000 over two years. Both early-career investigators and established researchers who are new to the lupus field are encouraged to apply, making it one of the few LRA mechanisms that explicitly welcomes lupus newcomers with strong methodological backgrounds or fresh conceptual frameworks. Eligible applicants include universities and nonprofit research institutions; for-profit entities are ineligible as lead applicants. The 2027 cycle deadline has been listed as passed on the LRA funding page; the recurrence pattern suggests a new cycle will open. Scientific inquiries go to Mara Lennard Richard, PhD, at mrichard@lupusresearch.org, and administrative inquiries to Diomaris Gonzalez at dgonzalez@lupusresearch.org.

For investigators with bold hypotheses that challenge prevailing models of lupus pathogenesis, or with novel technology platforms that could reframe how lupus is studied, the Lupus Innovation Award provides $300K over two years to generate proof-of-concept data. The two-year, fixed-budget structure favors focused, hypothesis-driven aims over comprehensive program projects. Applications from non-lupus specialists should demonstrate clear relevance of their approach to lupus biology, while lupus investigators should emphasize the genuinely innovative and testable nature of the proposed idea.