Two leading Australian researchers have been awarded prestigious CSL Centenary Fellowships, each valued at $1.25 million over five years, to advance groundbreaking research in lifelong immunity and AI-driven protein design.
Together, the fellowships represent a $2.5 million investment in Australian innovation at the frontier of medical science.
The 2025 recipients are Dr Carolien van de Sandt of the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute and Dr Rhys Grinter of the Bio21 Institute, The University of Melbourne. They were announced at the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences Annual Meeting in Canberra yesterday.
Dr van de Sandt’s fellowship will support her research into why the human immune system loses its edge over time. As people age, the T-cells that fight viral infections become less effective and less adaptable to new threats, leaving older adults more vulnerable to diseases such as influenza, COVID-19 and RSV, and reducing vaccine effectiveness.
Her project will investigate how robust immunity develops in children, how it is maintained in healthy adults, and why it deteriorates in older populations. By studying immune responses following viral infections and vaccination, Dr van de Sandt aims to identify biological targets that could one day restore immune function and protect health across the lifespan.
Dr Grinter’s fellowship will accelerate a new frontier in drug discovery, using artificial intelligence to design and produce new proteins with unprecedented speed and precision. His work builds on Nobel Prize-winning advances in AI-driven protein structure prediction, which have revolutionised biomedical research.
He will focus on a family of proteins that regulate many fundamental cellular processes and are implicated in diseases ranging from cancer and metabolic disorders to infertility and heart disease. His ultimate goal is to develop a suite of AI-designed proteins that can form the basis of new medicines, while establishing an Australian capability to fast-track protein drug development from concept to clinic.
Dr Michael Wilson, CSL’s Senior Vice President and Head of Research, said the fellowships exemplify the company’s commitment to supporting transformative science.
“Dr van de Sandt and Dr Grinter are both conducting fundamental research in their respective fields of immunology and drug discovery,” he said. “With the support of the CSL Centenary Fellowships, their research will hopefully transform how we protect health and accelerate the development of essential new medicines.”