Winner · Immunology & Microbiology Subject Award 2026
Sarah M. Fortune
“CD8+ lymphocytes are critical for early control of tuberculosis in macaques”
The finalists
Ten universities. Ten projects. Ten academics.
Marcus Buggert
Human circulating and tissue-resident memory CD8+ T cells
Senior Lecturer, Docent and principal investigator at Karolinska Institutet's Center for Infectious Medicine, Marcus Buggert investigates human T cell immunity to viral infections and cancer. His Nature Immunology article with colleagues in Cardiff, Melbourne and Pennsylvania synthesises how circulating and tissue resident memory CD8 T cells develop, migrate and protect tissues, informing vaccines and immunotherapies.
Lucy S. K. Walker
Professor of Immune Regulation at UCL's Institute of Immunity and Transplantation, Lucy Walker studies the T cell checkpoints that fail in autoimmunity. Her Nature Communications study with Roche scientists in Zurich and Basel shows costimulation blockade combined with IL-2 can spare regulatory T cells while inhibiting autoimmune responses, informing tolerance promoting therapies for type 1 diabetes.
Sarah M. Fortune
CD8+ lymphocytes are critical for early control of tuberculosis in macaques
John LaPorte Given Professor and Chair of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Sarah Fortune leads tuberculosis research at the Ragon Institute. Her Journal of Experimental Medicine study with Pittsburgh and MIT collaborators shows CD8 lymphocytes are critical for early control of Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection in macaques, guiding vaccine design.
Guido Kroemer
Immunogenic cell stress and death
When cells are stressed or die, the immune system reads the signals they leave behind. This work examines immunogenic cell stress and death: how dying cells alert immune defences, and why that dialogue matters, a question sitting squarely at the meeting point of cell biology and immunology.
Christiane Dolecek
Global antibiotic consumption and usage in humans, 2000-18: a spatial modelling study
Antimicrobial resistance depends on how much antibiotic the world actually uses, yet many low- and middle-income countries lack the surveillance to say. This spatial modelling study combines household survey data on treatment of young children with respiratory infections and consumption figures from sources including WHO, IQVIA and European surveillance networks to estimate global antibiotic consumption from 2000 to 2018.
Isabelle Meyts
Each year brings new genetic explanations for why some immune systems fail. This expert committee update documents 55 newly recognised single-gene defects and one condition caused by autoantibodies, describing their key clinical and laboratory features and bringing the recognised total of inborn errors of immunity to 485.
Calum C. Bain
Macrophages take their cues from the tissue around them, and the lung is a demanding place to live. Reviewing a decade of rapid progress, the work examines how the lung environment shapes macrophage development, metabolism and function in health, infection, inflammation and repair, and sets out the questions the field still needs to answer.
Emma Yu
The Role of Oxidative Stress in Atherosclerosis
Atherosclerosis is a chronic inflammatory disease of the vascular system and the leading cause of cardiovascular disease worldwide. This review examines the part played by oxidative stress, describing how reactive oxygen species are both necessary for vascular signalling and capable of driving inflammation, endothelial dysfunction and altered lipid metabolism, and surveys the enzymes that produce them alongside the antioxidant systems meant to keep them in check.
Michael Platten
Clonally expanded B cells in multiple sclerosis bind EBV EBNA1 and GlialCAM
Published in Nature, the study examines clonally expanded B cells in multiple sclerosis and shows they bind both an Epstein-Barr virus protein, EBNA1, and GlialCAM, a molecule of the nervous system. The finding, from teams across Germany, the UK and the US, bears on how the virus may relate to the disease.
Y. Grace Chen
Cellular origins of dsRNA, their recognition and consequences
Double-stranded RNA is a hallmark of viral infection, yet cells produce it themselves as well. The work reviews where cellular double-stranded RNA comes from, how the cell's sensors recognise it and what follows when they do, a question central to understanding immune activation and its misfiring.
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Clonally expanded B cells in multiple sclerosis bind EBV EBNA1 and GlialCAM
Cross-tissue single-cell landscape of human monocytes and macrophages in health and disease
Guidelines for the use of flow cytometry and cell sorting in immunological studies (third edition)
Active eosinophils regulate host defence and immune responses in colitis
Personalized RNA neoantigen vaccines stimulate T cells in pancreatic cancer
Research priorities for an HIV cure: International AIDS Society Global Scientific Strategy 2021
SARS-CoV-2 infection triggers profibrotic macrophage responses and lung fibrosis
Two Randomized Trials of Neutralizing Antibodies to Prevent HIV-1 Acquisition
Two Randomized Trials of Neutralizing Antibodies to Prevent HIV-1 Acquisition
Obesity alters pathology and treatment response in inflammatory disease
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