Lupus Innovation Award

The Lupus Innovation Award is a Lupus Research Alliance grant for high-risk, high-reward ideas that tackle major challenges in lupus research. It sits inside the alliance’s broader strategy to support work across the full research spectrum, but this award is the one most clearly aimed at fresh mechanisms, new tools, and unconventional approaches. The program provides $300,000 over two years on an annual cycle in the United States. Universities, nonprofit organizations, and research organizations are eligible, while individuals and for-profit companies are not. The call gives particular weight to fundamental mechanisms, novel targets and pathways, novel technologies, and interdisciplinary approaches, and it welcomes both early-career investigators and established investigators new to lupus. This award fits projects that are genuinely original but still grounded enough to move the field forward. Strong proposals usually make a crisp case for why the idea is different, why the team can execute it, and how the result would change what lupus researchers can test next.

Each grant below is a distinct funding opportunity with its own eligibility, scope, and deliverables.