Immunologist wins GSK Award for respiratory virus research

Professor Katherine Kedzierska has received the 2026 GSK Award for Research Excellence (ARE) — one of the most prestigious and longstanding independent awards open to Australian medical researchers — for her career-long search for the answer to one of medicine’s most important questions: why do some people recover quickly from respiratory viruses while others become critically ill?

Respiratory viruses such as flu, RSV and COVID-19 continue to place a significant burden on Australians every year, while concern continues to grow around other emerging respiratory viruses such as avian flu. Yet despite decades of medical advances, clinicians still have limited tools to predict which patients will rapidly deteriorate and which will recover. Kedzierska has spent her career trying to change that.

A National Health and Medical Research Council Leadership Fellow, laboratory head at The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, Distinguished Professor at The University of Melbourne and Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, Kedzierska is internationally recognised for her research into the immune mechanisms that determine how people respond to respiratory viral infections. Her interest in respiratory viruses intensified during the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic, which highlighted just how differently patients can respond to the same infection and inspired her to dedicate her research to understanding why.

“Respiratory infections are often a race between the virus and our immune system,” Kedzierska said. “Our goal is to better understand why that balance tips towards severe disease in some people, so we can identify those at greatest risk earlier and ultimately develop therapies that prevent the immune response from causing further harm.”

Among her team’s most significant breakthroughs is the discovery that elevated activity of the OLAH gene is consistently associated with fatal outcomes across multiple respiratory illnesses. While studying patients hospitalised with avian flu, her team observed unusually high levels of OLAH in those who became critically ill. Years later, they found the same biological pattern in patients with severe COVID-19 and also in RSV, suggesting OLAH may represent a common pathway underlying severe respiratory disease across multiple viruses.

The $150,000 GSK Award for Research Excellence grant will support the next phase of Kedzierska’s research, including the development and validation of a rapid blood test capable of predicting disease severity, alongside laboratory testing of promising therapeutic candidates targeting the harmful inflammatory pathways associated with OLAH.

“This award and accompanying grant will help us take the next step by advancing research into new ways of predicting severe disease and evaluating potential therapies that could improve outcomes for patients,” Kedzierska said.

Dr Alan Paul, Executive Country Medical Director at GSK Australia, said Kedzierska’s dedication to understanding one of the biggest challenges in infectious diseases has “the potential to transform the way clinicians predict and manage severe respiratory illness”.

He concluded, “For 46 years, the GSK Award for Research Excellence has celebrated Australian researchers whose discoveries have advanced medicine and improved patient care. Professor Kedzierska’s work is a powerful example of that legacy, and we are proud to support the next phase of her research.”

Image caption: Professor Katherine Kedzierska with the 2026 GSK Award for Research Excellence. Image: Supplied.