Understand lupus
Build a foundation in disease patterns, immune mechanisms, organs, tests, and the language used in research.
Learn the foundationsCuring Lupus · a living evidence map
Two questions, honestly answered.
What might be causing lupus, and what has actually happened when people tried to fix it. Every answer graded by how strong the evidence really is—including the ones that turned out to be wrong.
Start anywhere
A clearer path through a complex disease
Every subject begins with a plain explanation, then opens into graded evidence, limitations, and paper-level detail. Nothing is simplified past the point of being true.
What causes it
15 cause candidates in plain language—4 proven but only in rare groups, the rest ranked by how strong the evidence actually is.
See the cause candidatesWhat's been tried
15 approaches sorted by what happened when treatment stopped—1 produced drug-free remission, 3 were tested and failed.
See the fix attemptsConnected evidence
A loop, not a chain
Debris the body cannot clear sets off an immune sensor, which lets self-attacking cells survive, which drives inflammation, which creates more debris. Different people appear to enter that loop at different points.
Illustrative pathway map—not a claim of a single linear disease process. Select a connection in the full atlas to inspect supporting and conflicting evidence.
Featured questions
What the evidence can—and cannot—tell us
The labels below separate clinical outcomes from mechanisms, models, and site-generated hypotheses.
Emerging / preliminaryVerified 2026-08-05
Deep B-cell reset has produced something no lupus drug ever has
In a prospective trial, people with severe refractory disease stopped all lupus medication and stayed in remission. No approved drug produces remission that survives stopping treatment.
Inspect the evidence
Key uncertainty
Follow-up is around a year in a highly selected refractory group. An older whole-immune-system reset relapsed in roughly half of people by three to five years, and nobody has yet sequenced the cells at an autoimmune relapse to learn where disease returns from.
See what happened, and what is unknown →ContradictedVerified 2026-08-05
The first lupus prevention trial was negative
Hydroxychloroquine did not delay progression from incomplete lupus to classified disease, overturning an earlier retrospective signal and leaving the field with no validated prevention option.
Inspect the evidence
What this changes
It may say more about the population than the drug: far fewer participants progressed than the trial assumed. Identifying who will actually progress now has to come before any further prevention attempt. This does not affect hydroxychloroquine's established role in diagnosed lupus.
Read the full record →How to read this site
Certainty should be visible—not buried in a footnote.
A plausible mechanism is not the same as a clinical benefit. An association is not proof of causation. A promising case series is not an established therapy. And a drug that works while you take it has not cured anything.
- Trace every claimOpen the source and see what design produced the result.
- Grade directnessSeparate patient outcomes from biomarkers, animal models, and inference.
- Search for conflictInclude null findings, failed trials, and alternative explanations.
- Date the evidenceShow when a claim or trial status was last checked.