"The report findings demonstrate that the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries cannot develop lupus treatments in a vacuum," said Rick Goulburn, Executive Vice President - Global Autoimmune Therapy Area at Vifor Pharma. "We need more collaboration and partnership across all sectors of the field, greater investment by the federal government in basic lupus research, and continued leadership from the LFA and the entire scientific community."

Lupus drug development has had many setbacks in recent years including the failure of several promising new treatments. However, much has been learned from these trials and potentially greater insight can be gained if the data is evaluated collectively.

An immediate outgrowth of the expert panel meeting held in June is the LFA Collective Data Analysis Initiative (LFA CDAI), chaired by Kenneth Kalunian, M.D., Professor of Medicine, Division of Rheumatology, Allergy and Immunology, at the University of California, San Diego, to advance the knowledge of lupus and optimize clinical trial design by researching data from previous and existing lupus clinical trials.

"The lupus community certainly recognizes the urgent need for collaboration," said Dr. Kalunian. "Following the expert panel meeting, working groups were immediately established to begin tackling the recommendations that were identified. When fully implemented, these initiatives will help gain needed insight on the issues which have plagued lupus clinical trials and develop more effective ways to design them, so ultimately lupus trials can be completed successfully."

Source: Lupus Foundation of America, Inc.