Dr Carolien van de Sandt - Biography
Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, Melbourne
2026 CSL Centenary Fellow
Could we all have life-long robust immunity?
For as long as Carolien can remember, she has been fascinated by the fact that the same virus can result in mild infections in one person, but have devastating outcomes in another. This fascination led her to a PhD at Erasmus University, Rotterdam, then to a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Action Fellowship, and a subsequent move to Australia and the Doherty Institute at the University of Melbourne.
Carolien now leads a research team at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne, a move enabled by the CSL Centenary Fellowship.
She has published more than 70 papers including as first author in Nature Immunology, Nature Communications and other high impact journals.
Before the pandemic, Carolien’s research focused on influenza viruses. In 2018, she published a review of the lessons learned from the devastating 1918 pandemic, providing new insights into risk factors that would affect a 21st century pandemic. Then, when COVID-19 emerged, she rapidly pivoted to investigating the immune response of hospitalised patients, and then, to understanding how the response to COVID vaccines in younger and older people. Her research influenced 52 policy documents across 14 countries, WHO & European Commission, leading to change in vaccine strategies for both COVID-19 and influenza.
While we previously knew that our T-cells can become exhausted when fighting long term (chronic) infections, Carolien’s research has shown that T-cells respond differently to acute infections like influenza. She found that the way our T-cells recognise and eliminate a virus-infected cell changes as we age. In older people, T-cells become less effective because of changes in the cell’s receptors that are needed to identify and eliminate the virus-infected cells.
Importantly, she found that this does not happen in everyone. Some people live to 100 years or more with the help of a robust immune system. Meanwhile, other people may have an impaired immune system due to cancer treatment or surgery, but part of their immune system can still mount an effective immune response to viruses and vaccines.
Carolien will use her Centenary Fellowship to attempt to solve this puzzle through intensive study of how virus-specific T-cell immunity evolves throughout the course of our lives.
She hopes that her findings will open up new avenues for interventions to restore the immune system, and that this will lead to vaccines and treatments to improve the immune response in millions of people with an impaired immune system.
Read more about Dr Carolien van de Sandt at https://www.mcri.edu.au/researcher-details/carolien-van-de-sandt
Our immune systems change as we age, making us more vulnerable to viral infections and reducing the effectiveness of vaccines. Dr Carolien van de Sandt plans to reverse this immune ageing.
Carolien has identified how, as we age, our T-cells become less effective at fighting acute viral infections and less flexible in response to novel viruses. She will use her $1.25 million CSL Centenary Fellowship to study how children generate robust immunity, how healthy adults maintain optimal immunity, and how immunity becomes impaired in most older people and in others with immune impairment.
She will investigate how our immunity develops and then declines:
- following acute viral infections including influenza A and B, COVID-19, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), measles, smallpox
- following chronic viral infections including cytomegalovirus (CMV) and Epstein-Barr virus;
- following vaccination.
For as long as Carolien can remember, she has been fascinated by the fact that the same virus can result in mild infections in one person, but have devastating outcomes in another. This fascination led her to a PhD at Erasmus University, Rotterdam, then to a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Action Fellowship, and a subsequent move to Australia and the Doherty Institute at the University of Melbourne.
Carolien now leads a research team at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne, a move enabled by the CSL Centenary Fellowship.
She has published more than 70 papers including as first author in Nature Immunology, Nature Communications and other high impact journals.
Before the pandemic, Carolien’s research focused on influenza viruses. In 2018, she published a review of the lessons learned from the devastating 1918 pandemic, providing new insights into risk factors that would affect a 21st century pandemic. Then, when COVID-19 emerged, she rapidly pivoted to investigating the immune response of hospitalised patients, and then, to understanding how the response to COVID vaccines in younger and older people. Her research influenced 52 policy documents across 14 countries, WHO & European Commission, leading to change in vaccine strategies for both COVID-19 and influenza.
While we previously knew that our T-cells can become exhausted when fighting long term (chronic) infections, Carolien’s research has shown that T-cells respond differently to acute infections like influenza. She found that the way our T-cells recognise and eliminate a virus-infected cell changes as we age. In older people, T-cells become less effective because of changes in the cell’s receptors that are needed to identify and eliminate the virus-infected cells.
Importantly, she found that this does not happen in everyone. Some people live to 100 years or more with the help of a robust immune system. Meanwhile, other people may have an impaired immune system due to cancer treatment or surgery, but part of their immune system can still mount an effective immune response to viruses and vaccines.
Carolien will use her Centenary Fellowship to attempt to solve this puzzle through intensive study of how virus-specific T-cell immunity evolves throughout the course of our lives.
She hopes that her findings will open up new avenues for interventions to restore the immune system, and that this will lead to vaccines and treatments to improve the immune response in millions of people with an impaired immune system.
Read more about Dr Carolien van de Sandt at https://www.mcri.edu.au/researcher-details/carolien-van-de-sandt