The Nutrition for OUR Immune System Health Autoimmunity Challenge: A Framework for Crowdsourcing Solutions Focused on...

The objective of this brief report is to inform the autoimmune research community about the engagement and ideas generated through the NOURISH: Autoimmunity Challenge.

Building on gaps identified during a 2024 NIH workshop on diet, mucosal immunity, and immune-mediated disease, OADR-ORWH launched a public ideation challenge on September 2, 2025. The challenge solicited feasible, testable, scalable, and high-impact concepts to advance diet and nutrition research across autoimmune diseases. Outreach included a public webinar, social media dissemination, and office hours for participants. Submissions were evaluated by NIH judges using five criteria: understanding of the problem/scientific rationale, engagement, potential impact, feasibility, and innovation.

The challenge received 44 eligible submissions from 15 individuals, 9 teams, and 17 entities. Fifteen winning entries and 3 honorable mentions were recognized. Winning concepts clustered into four cross-cutting themes: 1) effectiveness of dietary interventions in autoimmune disease; 2) microbiome, immune, and multi-omics mechanisms; 3) personalized, data-driven, and predictive nutrition; and 4) community voice, landscape assessment, and patient-centered frameworks. Proposed approaches spanned randomized dietary interventions, biomarker and microbiome studies, real-world nutrition tracking, predictive modeling, and patient-centered frameworks. A prominent unmet need across submissions was for digital health tools to capture diet, symptoms, flares, medications, sleep, physical activity, physiologic signals, and patient-reported outcomes in real time.

The NOURISH challenge demonstrates that crowdsourcing can effectively engage patients, advocates, clinicians, researchers, and innovators to identify actionable research opportunities at the intersection of nutrition and autoimmunity, while highlighting digital health as a key future scientific opportunity.