UNSW expert wins international award for pioneering autoimmune disease research

UNSW Sydney Professor Christopher Goodnow received the 2027 Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize for discoveries that reshaped how we understand and treat autoimmune disease.  

Professor Christopher Goodnow from the School of Biomedical Sciences and The Garvan Institute of Medical Research has been awarded the 2027 Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize, Germany’s most prestigious award for medical research.

The honour, named after the scientist who discovered antibodies, recognises Prof. Goodnow’s pioneering research revealing how the body normally avoids making “bad antibodies” against its own tissues, and how these safeguards fail in autoimmune disease.

Professor David Simar, Acting Dean of Medicine & Health at UNSW, said this prestigious award highlighted Professor Goodnow’s career-long commitment to advancing vital medical knowledge.

“Professor Goodnow has made an extraordinary contribution to the field of biomedical science and our fundamental understanding of the immune system and autoimmune diseases and how these might be treated,” Prof. Simar said.

Overturning a long-held dogma

Beginning with his doctoral research in the late 1980s, and continuing across his career, Professor Goodnow developed a body of evidence that overturned decades of prevailing immunology understanding. 

He revealed that B cells – white blood cells responsible for producing antibodies – with antibodies against ‘self’ were routinely released into circulation, but were silenced against secreting these bad antibodies. He went on to establish how and why the immune system took this seemingly risky approach, and what happened when cells escape silencing.

“When I started my research, most leading immunologists thought I was wasting my time. They firmly believed B cells had no built-in safeguards to stop them making bad antibodies,” Prof. Goodnow said.

“Finding that self-reactive B cells are released into the bloodstream in a dormant state changed how we understand the balance that needs to be struck between not making bad antibodies against self and making good antibodies against foreign invaders.”

What a new technology revealed

Prof. Goodnow took advantage of emerging genome-engineering technologies to develop a novel experimental system that made it possible, for the first time, to track self-reactive B cells inside the body as they met their target self-proteins.

Through this technology, he quantified what their dormant state looks like: the cells stop secreting harmful antibodies and their activity is turned down twenty-fold. This functional silencing is now known as ‘anergy’.

Professor Thomas Boehm, Chairman of the Scientific Council of the Paul Ehrlich Foundation, explained the significance of this shift in understanding.

“By demonstrating the existence of clonal anergy, the laureate fundamentally challenged the black-and-white thinking that had long dominated classical immunology,” Prof. Boehm said.

“His work showed that the immune system must constantly balance the risk of autoimmunity with defensive readiness in order to function effectively. His discoveries on B-cell tolerance have profoundly advanced our understanding of how autoimmune diseases arise.”

Parallels with cancer – and a path to new treatments

Prof. Goodnow’s subsequent research has focused on the complex signalling pathways and immune checkpoints that regulate these cells.

“Only by understanding why most people do not develop autoimmune disease can we understand what goes wrong in those who do,” he said.

His work has revealed striking parallels between autoimmune diseases and cancer: both develop over many years through the gradual failure of molecular control mechanisms, often driven by spontaneous genetic mutations that accumulate one on top of another.

Prof. Goodnow will travel to Germany to accept the prize at a ceremony in Frankfurt’s Paulskirche on the birthday of Paul Ehrlich, 14 March 2027.

Christopher Goodnow is The Bill and Patricia Ritchie Foundation Chair at the Garvan Institute and a Professor of the Cellular Genomics Futures Institute and School of Biomedical Sciences, UNSW Sydney.