Episode 89: The Future of Autoimmune Research with Victoria Shanmugam, Director of the Office of Autoimmune Disease Research

Autoimmune disease affects an estimated 50 million Americans, yet for decades these conditions have often received less attention, coordination, and funding than other major chronic diseases.

That landscape is beginning to change.

In this episode of the Autoimmune Wellness Podcast, Mickey Trescott is joined by Dr. Victoria Shanmugam, rheumatologist, physician-scientist, and Director of the Office of Autoimmune Disease Research (OADR) at the National Institutes of Health. Created by Congress in 2023, the OADR was established to coordinate autoimmune disease research across the NIH and help accelerate progress in understanding, treating, preventing, and ultimately curing autoimmune diseases.

Together, Mickey and Dr. Shanmugam discuss why the office was created, how autoimmune research is evolving, and the most promising areas of innovation currently underway. They explore everything from environmental triggers and large-scale data platforms to early disease detection, CAR-T therapies, and the future of personalized autoimmune medicine.

This conversation offers a hopeful and practical look at where autoimmune research is headed—and what that progress could mean for patients over the next decade.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why the Office of Autoimmune Disease Research was created and what its mission is
• How autoimmune diseases intersect with every organ system and NIH research institute
• What the first NIH-wide Strategic Plan for Autoimmune Disease Research includes
• Why studying multiple autoimmune diseases together may accelerate discoveries
• How environmental exposures may influence autoimmune disease risk and progression
• The role of large-scale collaborations and data-sharing platforms in research
• Why early detection and preclinical autoimmune disease are major areas of focus
• How Type 1 diabetes research is shaping new approaches to prevention
• What CAR-T therapies and other immune-targeted treatments may offer in the future
• Why patient participation and advocacy remain essential to research progress
• What researchers hope to achieve over the next five to ten years in autoimmune medicine

Resources:

• Office of Autoimmune Disease Research (OADR)
• NIH-Wide Strategic Plan for Autoimmune Disease Research
• OADR Quarterly Community Updates (Must Attend Live)
• NOURISH Challenge Initiative
• EXACT Plan Network (Environmental Exposures & Autoimmune Disease)

Episode Timeline:

00:00 – Why autoimmune research is entering a new era

01:41 – Introducing Dr. Victoria Shanmugam

03:29 – What is the Office of Autoimmune Disease Research?

04:58 – Why autoimmune diseases have historically been under-researched

07:19 – Goals of the OADR and coordination across NIH

09:54 – Studying more than 140 autoimmune diseases together

12:00 – The NOURISH challenge and nutrition research initiatives

14:07 – Promising areas of autoimmune disease research

16:09 – Environmental exposures and the EXACT Plan Network

17:28 – Autoimmune Centers of Excellence and cross-disease collaboration

18:34 – New clinical trials and prevention-focused research

20:02 – Early detection and preclinical autoimmune disease

21:18 – Data platforms and large-scale collaboration efforts

25:18 – How patients should think about research progress

26:32 – What the next 5–10 years may bring

28:49 – How patients can stay informed and engaged

30:16 – Why patient voices matter in research

31:00 – Wrap-up and closing reflections

Mickey (2): Autoimmune disease affects an estimated fifty million Americans.

That is more people than are living with cancer, heart disease, and many

other major health conditions combined.

And yet for decades, autoimmune diseases have often existed in

the shadows of medical research.

Patients have faced long diagnostic delays, limited treatment options,

and too often the feeling that their condition wasn't fully understood.

But that landscape is beginning to change.

In recent years, we've seen growing recognition that autoimmune diseases

represent a major public health challenge.

New research initiatives are emerging, large-scale collaborations are

bringing scientists together across specialties, and as of 2023, the

National Institutes of Health has a dedicated Office of Autoimmune Disease

Research focused on coordinating and accelerating progress across the

entire autoimmune disease spectrum.

Today, we're talking with the person leading that effort.

Dr. Victoria Shanmugam serves as Director of the Office of Autoimmune

Disease Research within the NIH Office of Research on Women's Health.

She's a physician scientist, rheumatologist, and a recognized

leader in autoimmune disease research.

In this conversation, we'll explore why the office was created, what it's working

on, where the most exciting areas of research are emerging, and what all of

this could mean for people living with autoimmune disease in the years ahead.

Welcome back to the Autoimmune Wellness Podcast.

I'm your host, Mickey Trescott, and today I'm honored to be joined by Dr.

Victoria Shanmugam, director of the Office of Autoimmune Disease Research

at the National Institutes of Health.

Dr. Shanmugam is a physician-scientist, rheumatologist, and a leader

in autoimmune disease research.

She earned her degree in physiology from Oxford University and her

medical degree from Imperial College School of Medicine in London,

graduating with honors in medicine.

She completed her internal medicine residency and rheumatology fellowship

at Georgetown University, where she later joined the faculty and built

a distinguished career caring for patients with complex autoimmune

diseases while also leading research and medical education initiatives.

Throughout her career, Dr. Shanmugam has been deeply involved

in advancing our understanding of autoimmune and rheumatic diseases.

Prior to joining the NIH, she served in a number of leadership roles in academic

medicine and is widely recognized for her work in systemic sclerosis, vasculitis,

and other autoimmune conditions, as well as for her commitment to improving

patient care and accelerating research.

Today, she leads the Office of Autoimmune Disease Research, which was established

to strengthen coordination across the NIH and help advance research efforts

spanning the many different autoimmune diseases that affect millions of people.

I'm so excited to learn more about the work happening behind the

scenes, the opportunities that lie ahead, and how patients can better

understand the evolving landscape of autoimmune disease research.

Before we begin, a quick reminder that this podcast is intended for

educational and informational purposes only, and is not a substitute for

medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

Always consult your healthcare team regarding any medical

questions or decisions.

And with that introduction, let's welcome Dr. Victoria Shanmugam to the podcast.

Oh, thank you, Mickey.

That's such a great introduction, and I'm really delighted to

join you on the show today.

Awesome.

Well, let's just jump right in.

Can you share a bit about your role and what the Office of Autoimmune

Disease Research is and why it was created in the first place?

Absolutely.

So I am the director of the Office of Autoimmune Disease Research, also

fondly known as OADR at the NIH.

The office, as you mentioned, is quite young.

It was formed at the direction of Congress in the Consolidated

Appropriations Act in 2023.

And it was tasked with six specific directives: to coordinate the development

of an NIH-wide strategic plan for autoimmune disease research, to identify

emerging areas of innovation and research opportunities, to coordinate

and foster collaborative research across the NIH, to annually do an evaluation

of the NIH autoimmune disease research portfolio, to provide resources to

support planning, collaboration, and innovation, and to develop some form of

publicly available, centralized repository for autoimmune disease research.

And we can talk a little bit more about that as we get deeper into the podcast.

But those six directives, along with some of the findings of a National

Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine report, looking at enhancing

NIH research on autoimmune disease, were what really guided the establishment

of the office and are foundational to the work that we're doing today.

Awesome.

Well, thank you for that, and I'm sure everybody's really interested to know

kind of where this work came from.

Autoimmune disease affects so many people, yet historically it hasn't

always been a central focus of research.

I'd love to know from your perspective what has contributed to that and

what do you see changing now?

Yeah.

So there are, as you mentioned in the intro, about 50 million Americans

estimated to be living with autoimmune disease, and the rates are increasing.

We don't exactly know why, but we also are struggling to know the

exact prevalence of many autoimmune diseases because we don't have good

comprehensive longitudinal data sets.

When we take together all of the autoimmune diseases, as you

mentioned, this is one of the most common groups of chronic conditions

affecting the American people.

But we don't have a good coordinated structure for studying them.

These diseases are quite often systemic, and when we look at the body as a whole,

we recognize that autoimmune disease research really intersects with every

organ and system in the body and therefore intersects with the mission of every

single institute and center at the NIH.

So a coordinated approach is really essential.

I'm excited to tell your listeners that in July of 2025, we published

the first ever NIH-wide strategic plan for autoimmune disease research.

And and that's really giving us a guiding framework and a roadmap

for how to approach the scientific priorities over the next five years.

We identify in that plan some specific priorities, objectives, and

cross-cutting themes that the NIH thinks are important to focus on.

And within those priorities, there is an objective to expand autoimmune disease

research focused on the many autoimmune diseases that co-occur with each other,

as well as the comorbid conditions that co-occur alongside autoimmune diseases

such as endometriosis, fibromyalgia, often with other autoimmune diseases.

And again, the pathogenesis for many of those conditions are, are really unclear.

Wonderful.

Yeah, as somebody who is a representative of the three autoimmune diseases

club, I'm really excited to hear about that, and I know a lot of our

listeners are very curious about those conditions that seem to tag along with

autoimmune conditions even though they might not be autoimmune themselves.

So thank you so much for sharing that.

What are the main goals of the Office of Autoimmune Disease

Research, and how is that helping to coordinate efforts across the NIH?

Well, the mission of the Office of Autoimmune Disease

Research is to support high-priority autoimmune disease research, identify

emerging areas of innovation, and really foster collaboration across the

NIH institutes and centers or ICs or ICOs, institute centers and offices.

As I mentioned, autoimmune disease research really intersects

with the work of every single institute and center at NIH.

But that means that the research is touched by all the ICs, but really

led by none, because it isn't, kind of owned by any single IC.

The actual largest funder of autoimmune disease research is the National

Institute of Diabetes, Digestive, and Kidney Diseases, so NIDDK.

In part due to the very large Type I diabetes appropriation, which

really had transformative impact on the management of people living with

and at risk for Type I diabetes.

And what that tells us and has shown us is that with investment, we can really

shift the paradigm in understanding, not only diagnosis and treatment, but also,

potentially even get to prevention, for these diseases and has been able to get

there in Type I diabetes and tells us it's probably possible in, in many of

these other autoimmune diseases too.

Wow.

As I mentioned, we do all of our work in partnership

with the ICs, and the roadmap for that work is the NIH-wide Strategic

Plan for Autoimmune Disease Research.

If you pull it up online, and I think there's a link in your show notes,

you'll see there's five main priorities.

We want to accelerate scientific discovery and diagnosis, treatment,

prevention, and cure, and we spend a lot of time thinking about that word

cure and was it really possible, and we decided we needed to include cure.

To promote research focused on enhancing health for people living with

and at risk for autoimmune disease.

To support research to understand this full complexity of autoimmune

diseases and indeed the complexity across the lifespan as well.

To build and maintain capacity for autoimmune disease research.

And then, the fifth objective is really a, a critical one, to build

and strengthen our partnerships and interdisciplinary collaborations across

the autoimmune disease community.

I love that.

That is all just such an important scope of work that you guys are

collaborating on there, and probably pretty overwhelming when you

consider all of the single diseases.

And that's actually the next thing I really wanted to talk about is the

challenge in autoimmune disease, really just how many different conditions fall

under the umbrella of autoimmune disease.

How does the office approach research across such this vast range of diseases?

Yeah, it's a great question.

The autoimmune diseases, as you say, are an incredibly varied group of conditions.

They affect every part of the body.

Many of them manifest at different points in the life course and

some across the life course.

There are more than a hundred and forty known autoimmune disease and there may

be more that we have not yet defined.

And the symptoms obviously vary extensively, based on organs involved

and the different diseases involved.

But because the immune system traffics into every organ, we know

that autoimmune diseases can affect any system in the body, sometimes

many systems simultaneously.

And I think what that really calls out to us is that this is an amazing

opportunity to really understand the immune system as that missing link.

We are approaching things very broadly.

When the office was formed, we convened a coordinating committee for autoimmune

disease research, and that committee has really a brain trust of experts from

every single institute and center at NIH.

And they come together every month to discuss, both what our strategy should be

in terms of our approaches, and then also to think about not only what can we do

today, but what can we do for the future.

And I think one of the points that we really thought about quite deeply when we

were putting together the strategic plan and as we start new strategic initiatives

is, not just what the scientists and patients can do today, but what will the

patients of 2030 and 2050 wish we'd done today to ensure that autoimmune disease

research can really push the boundaries of what's possible as we move to the future.

We have a fairly modest budget in the Office of Autoimmune Disease Research,

but we try to use it really wisely, across and in collaboration with the institutes

and centers to support a wide range of research, from fundamental immunologic

research, that looks at the mechanisms of autoimmunity and autoimmune disease.

We have supported a number of projects investigating preclinical

autoimmunity, studies that are focusing on treatments, both improving treatments

and then also helping those treatments reach patients across America.

And then we also support some infrastructure for autoimmune

disease research, as well as some novel public-private partnerships

to improve engagement for people living with autoimmune disease

in the research continuum.

One of the initiatives that I know you were engaged with, Mickey, in 2025

to 2026 was the NOURISH initiative.

This was the Nutrition for Our Immune System Health Autoimmunity Challenge.

The beauty of challenge mechanisms are that they have a slightly lower bar of

entry in terms of complexity of submitting an application, which means we can

make them quite open to our community.

So this was a crowdsourced ideation challenge for our community to

submit some ideas on how to better integrate diet and nutrition

into autoimmune disease research.

We were really excited to see the ideas that came in, and if you didn't catch

the webinar live, I really encourage you to watch the winners' webinar.

The link is still live on our nourishchallenge.org website.

You can watch the video and see the winners talk a

little bit about their ideas.

But that was something where, you know, we had a unique opportunity, to

really bring our community in to this kind of dynamic research paradigm,

and work together to come up with some ways to move this field forward.

Yeah.

I love that, and I love that it sounds like you guys are really looking for

the common threads in really trying to help improve the lives of people

with all of the scope of autoimmune disease instead of honing in on one

or two that affect the most people.

So I know the community is really appreciative of that.

And I loved participating in that challenge and hearing

about everybody that won.

That was just such an inspiring group.

So thank you for doing that.

What are some of the most promising areas of autoimmune disease research right now

that patients like me should be aware of?

Oh, I'm so thrilled that you asked that question 'cause I

have so many good things to tell you.

So, OADR is small and fairly new, but I'm really pleased that we've been able to

do some amazing things and support some incredible projects since we started.

Back in 2023, one of the inaugural funding opportunities from OADR was a

program called the EXACT Plan Network.

National research collaborative focused on understanding how

environmental exposures shape autoimmune disease risk onset and outcomes.

And the goals of this network were to build a system-level view of how

different factors across our lifespan, like chemicals, infections, diet, other

exposures, interact with our cells and tissues and organs and place us at

risk of multiple autoimmune diseases.

There were a number of exploratory and developmental projects supported through

this initiative, and they were really designed to help research institutions

lay the groundwork for studying this over the longer term, building partnerships,

strengthening infrastructure, and trying to develop the scientific capabilities

needed to contribute to a kind of larger research mission in this area.

That network is still working together, helping to move beyond studying one

autoimmune disease at a time and really integrating understanding of

how different environmental factors at different points in our life

might trigger and shape disease across the many different autoimmune

diseases and across our lifespans.

Another really exciting award that we have been co-funding in conjunction with the

National Institute of Allergy Infectious Diseases, or NIAID, is the Autoimmune

Centers of Excellence, or ACE program.

And the ACE network is a long-standing program of NIAID, but through funding

from our office, we were able to bring an additional center online within

that group, and that center focuses on autoimmune endocrinopathies,

so Type I diabetes, autoimmune thyroid disease, and a number of

other endocrine autoimmune diseases.

And that's really exciting because typically those researchers would

not have collaborated with the people studying rheumatoid arthritis and lupus,

and other rheumatologic autoimmune diseases, and they typically would

not have interacted closely with the basic science immunologists.

But by bringing this additional center into the ACE network, it's

really catalyzed opportunities for collaboration, studies looking at the

immunologic mechanisms of these diseases, most importantly, across diseases.

So really getting to that point that you made earlier, that you're one of

the people who has multiple autoimmune diseases, this is really common.

And as a rheumatologist who used to see patients in the clinic, I have seen

this many times, and yet we have not got a great mechanism for studying those

co-occurrences of autoimmune disease.

And this is a way that we can actually really accelerate

the science in that arena.

I wanna tell you also about a couple clinical trials that we're supporting.

That again, is like another place where we can really invest to

support accelerating the science.

One that we're particularly excited about is the AVERT study, stand for

Atrioventricular Block Elimination by Rosanoliximab Treatment.

So that's a mouthful.

But this is looking at a new treatment for women with the SSA

antibody or Sjogren's antibody.

We see this both in Sjogren's disease and then also in lupus, and

sometimes in rheumatoid arthritis.

Women who happen to carry this autoantibody are at risk of having a

baby that is affected by a condition called congenital heart block.

The antibodies from the mother can cross the placenta and cause a problem

with the baby's heart formation.

And they very often can develop stillbirth, unfortunately.

So through funding from the Office of Autoimmune Disease Research in

conjunction with the National Institute of Arthritis, Musculoskeletal and Skin

Diseases, or NIAMS, we've been able to support this clinical trial that's

looking at a new monoclonal antibody, given, during the pregnancy, during

that critical window when the antibodies can cross the placenta and cause the

problem with the baby's heart formation.

And this therapy, looking very promising, as something that might be

able to reduce that antibody burden, and reduce the risk to the baby.

This particular study is led by Jill Byon New York University and

is really focused on trying to study this in women that are at high risk.

We also have been working to try and support studies that are looking at

earlier detection of autoimmune diseases.

We're increasingly recognizing that many autoimmune diseases have this prodromal

phase, and I think patients living with autoimmune disease will recollect

this in themselves, where there are abnormalities in the immune system,

even before the doctors can really detect a definable autoimmune disease.

If we could better identify those at highest risk through biomarkers,

through autoantibodies, through immune profiling, we potentially

could get to a place where we can diagnose disease earlier and hopefully

intervene perhaps before progression.

That's the paradigm that we've seen be successful in Type I diabetes,

and I think with continued work in this field, then we could potentially

see this in other diseases as well.

There's lots of exciting things coming down the pike in autoimmunity,

as you probably have been hearing.

New monoclonal antibodies, new disease-modifying treatments, some ways

to harness the immune system itself, alter the immune responses through chimeric

antigen receptor or CAR T-cell therapy and even regulatory T-cell therapies

where you engineer the T-cells to kinda dampen down the immune responses.

This area of science is evolving really rapidly, and I think shows

great hope, both as treatment and potentially as a durable remission for

people living with autoimmune disease.

We really need to be able to support the studies and the

research that must be done.

Wow.

Yeah, that is, that is so much.

The one thing that really stands out to me as somebody who recently in the

last year got diagnosed with my third autoimmune condition that I started having

symptoms 15 years ago, we all know how long it takes sometimes for your body to

really express enough factors in order to get a diagnosis, so I'm particularly

excited about that research for early detection and diagnosis and helping

people get on their feet faster, right?

So thank you so much for describing all of that.

No, it's so important, and we're so excited to do the work.

So yes, we hear you, and I think you're not alone.

I've seen this many times myself in my own clinic, and I hear it, from many patients.

So I think it's really important work.

Yeah.

Thank you so much.

So another thing that we're hearing about are things like data platforms

and large scale collaborations.

Basically, what do we do with all this information?

How are these changing the pace or the direction of the research

that's being done right now?

So glad you asked that question.

This is something our team and certainly our coordinating committee

for autoimmune disease research has been thinking really deeply about.

As I mentioned, the six congressional directives that set up the office,

number six was this task to develop some form of centralized repository for

autoimmune disease research, and we really approached this with a very broad lens.

As you and your listeners know, many conditions that we currently group

under one diagnosis are likely made up of biologically distinct subtypes.

And as we mentioned, people who have one autoimmune disease are at

a higher probability of developing other autoimmune diseases.

And so really important that we have mechanisms to allow us

to look at shared pathways that could contribute to autoimmunity.

We're at this really pivotal time.

There have been these amazing advances in genomics, proteomics, and other

molecular tools that are helping us define subgroups of disease more precisely.

But we're also very fortunate because computational power that we have

today far exceeds what was possible five years ago, even ten years ago.

And we really wanted to bring those two pieces together in a complementary way.

So through funding from the Office of Autoimmune Disease Research, we have

been collaborating with the National Library of Medicine, or NLM, establish

a federated digital data ecosystem.

Right now, that's stood up within the walls of the NIH, within the

National Library of Medicine, and we've called it the Autoimmune Disease

Analysis Platform Testing Space.

That stands for ADAPTS.

We picked that name because the immune system adapts, and we were looking

for something that could adapt and grow with the science over time.

And we know that as we learn more, we're gonna need to use this ecosystem and this

computational platform to do different things, and we thought that was a good

kinda metaphor for where we were heading.

The purpose of this platform is to allow researchers to analyze

distributed datasets for studying autoimmune disease research.

So what we're wanting to do is help researchers collaborate on these complex

analyses that they could not do with a single dataset or they could not do alone.

We're doing this right now within the walls of the NIH simply because we have

a structure that allows us to do this and kind of put it through its paces,

test it out, so that we can learn, where do we need to invest a little

more, what parts work easily, what parts are more complex, to sort of get

a little bit of control to the system.

But the beauty of this system is it supports governance and

privacy protection by design.

You don't move any data, so the federated model is that the computational power

really goes to the data to do the analysis and run the algorithm, but the data stays

in place, and there is no kind of exposure of the data to any outside entities.

We hope that with continued investment, that will be something that we can scale

more widely, so that we can have something that allows the entire autoimmune disease

research community to come together.

That will take time, and I think it's something that we will be kind

of, trying to develop over time.

But right now, working with this group of intramural investigators to really put

this through its paces and test whether or not this is gonna be the right model

to use for autoimmune disease research.

Oh, that is really impressive, and I'm really excited to hear

that you guys are using technology to its fullest potential to help

solve some of these problems.

So that's really exciting to hear about.

So my next question is for somebody living with autoimmune disease

today, how should they be thinking about progress in research?

What does that actually look like from your perspective?

Yeah.

So research is rarely a straight line.

And one of the things that really struck us as we were putting together the

NIH-wide strategic plan for autoimmune disease research was that if we start with

what matters patients, then we're gonna be answering important biologic questions.

And the other thing that I really want to emphasize for everyone listening

is that if we're partners in this, then every study, even negative

studies, will add to the knowledge base that moves the whole field forward.

People living with autoimmune disease should really know that

their experience, their questions and involvement are actually vital

to accelerating better treatments and ultimately prevention and cures.

And this could not be done alone.

And I think it's really important that we see this as a partnership,

because together we can do a lot more than any of us could do alone.

I love that so much.

Calling us all in, right?

I love it.

We, it needs everyone.

Yeah!

So when we look ahead, what feels realistic to you for the next five

to 10 years in terms of research and potential patient impacts?

'Cause I know people are pretty used to things moving pretty slow, but you've

told us about a lot of good things.

What do you see coming?

Yeah.

There's a lot of potential.

NIH is committed to advancing progress in autoimmune disease.

And to achieve that mission, you know, it takes multiple avenues.

So we are continuing to support fundamental research to identify

new therapeutic targets.

But it's also essential to support translational research that turns

those targets and new discoveries into clinical treatments that can

ultimately improve the health of people living with these diseases.

On top of that or layered on top of that, it's really important to build capacity

for autoimmune disease research through, not only the development of new tools,

new techniques, new methods and skilled workforce, but also the infrastructure

allows us to run clinical trials and to bring therapies to our patients.

These priorities are just vital for advancing and translating scientific

discoveries into improved outcomes for people living with autoimmune disease.

As I mentioned, that interest and research into the preclinical phase

of disease is another area of focus.

And I think we've learned a lot from the Type I diabetes community where

they've been able to not only identify the individuals that are high risk

for progressing from preclinical Type I diabetes to full-blown Type

I diabetes, but they also were able to identify a target to alter

the immune system in that phase.

That is now an FDA-approved therapy for people at risk for Type I diabetes

to prevent progression to full-blown Type I. And that's completely shifted

the paradigm for that disease.

And that success really tells us what's possible for these other

autoimmune disease conditions.

So I wanna kinda land on the thought that the future is really bright.

I think in the next five to ten years, we're gonna see huge advances in research

and potential impact for our patients.

I love that.

So here's a question that I know you'll have a great answer to

because I've been following you and some of this work for a while.

But I know our listeners would love to know the ways that patients or communities

can stay informed about or engage with these ongoing research efforts.

Oh, perfect lead in.

Yes.

We'd love for all of your listeners to join us.

Actually every quarter.

The Office of Autoimmune Disease Research hosts an open updates on OADR session.

Uh, it's typically held about a week after our internal coordinating committee meets.

We give a fairly high level update on what's going on in the life of the office,

and then there is a little bit of an open session where we let people unmute and

tell us what's going on in their lives and the lives of their organizations.

It's a really nice way for our community members to engage, share

their thoughts and experiences.

We always learn a lot from our who attend those sessions.

And it's really a, a very open forum.

Anyone can speak, just raise your hand and unmute.

You do have to attend live, so those sessions are not recorded.

But we are happy for people to drop in when they can, and I

hope that you guys can join us.

I love that so much, and we'll have the links to that in the show notes.

Lastly Dr. Shanmugam, this has been such a great interview.

Is there anything you'd like listeners to better understand about autoimmune disease

research or where things are headed?

Oh, I would just say your voice really matters.

I think it's really important to continue talking about how important

autoimmune disease research is.

Continued sustained funding is essential to support and expand the work both of

OADR and the NIH more generally, and to ensure that scientific discoveries

reach the patients living with autoimmune diseases across the United States.

Thank you so much.

That's such a perfect closing message.

Dr. Shanmugam, thank you for joining me today, for sharing your perspective on

the future of autoimmune disease research.

What really stands out to me from this conversation is there's so much more

coordination, collaboration, and momentum in this field than ever before, and it

sounds like you've got a lot of work ahead, but it's so encouraging to hear

about the investments that are being made to better understand autoimmune disease

and ultimately improve the lives of patients like myself in this community.

So thank you so much for sharing with us.

For everybody listening, we're going to include links in the

show notes to everything we referenced today, like the Office of

Autoimmune Disease Research website.

You can sign up for the email list, learn about some of the quarterly

webinars and any other public events, and stay up to date on the latest

initiatives and research opportunities.

As somebody who has spent many years in the autoimmune community, I

have personally enjoyed seeing more opportunities for patients, advocates,

researchers, and organizations to all come together around these conversations.

Staying connected and informed is one of the ways we can all

help move this field forward.

So thank you everybody for listening to the Autoimmune Wellness Podcast.

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and

share it with somebody who might benefit from the conversation.

Until next time, take care!