Claudia Nold

A/Professor Claudia Nold is a pharmacist by training with broad expertise in cytokine biology, inflammation and immunology. After her graduation from pharmacy school in 2000, she was awarded a competitive three-year PhD Fellowship by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (the German NHMRC equivalent) and started her PhD at the Pharmazentrum Frankfurt, Germany. This fellowship entailed a 6-month tenure at the Institute of Asthma and Allergy at the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden.

From 2006 until 2009 she held a post-doctoral position in Denver, Colorado, USA in the laboratory of Professor Charles A. Dinarello, who first described the function of Interleukin 1. Some of her achievements of this productive time included the description of anti-viral, endothelial and angiogenic properties of interleukin (IL-)32, and the important paper on the functional differences between monocytes and macrophages (200+ citations).

In 2009, A/Prof Nold was recruited to The Ritchie Centre at Hudson Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, and continued to publish at a very high level. Of outstanding importance, however, was the discovery of the function of IL-37, which has had a major impact on the interleukin field, leading to a fundamental reorganisation of the nomenclature of the IL-1 family of cytokines in 2010.

In 2011 she was awarded the Christina Fleischmann Award of the International Society of Interferon and Cytokine Research. This award recognizes young female investigators for notable contributions to basic or clinical research. The second achievement exemplifies the translational trajectory that is paramount to her laboratory: her team has almost completed the bedside-to-bench-and-back circuit with their work on interleukin 1 receptor antagonist (IL-1Ra) in bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD). There is an urgent medical need to find the first safe and effective treatment for BPD in the neonatal intensive care unit, and the Nold laboratory showed in a mouse model that IL-1Ra prevents the disease. The team is now planning a clinical trial to prove the concept in babies.

In 2014 A/Prof C Nold was awarded the top ranked Future Leader Fellowship and received the Paul Korner Innovation Award of the Australian Heart Foundation.

Because of these innovative programs, the Nold team has been awarded substantial grant funding, filed several patents and are collaborating with multiple partners in the pharmaceutical industry.