Dr Thinh-Phat Cao is a structural biologist at Monash University, specialising in the molecular principles that govern immune recognition. He earned his PhD in Structural Biology, where his dissertation examined the structural determinants underlying antibiotic resistance in pathogenic bacteria, providing a strong mechanistic foundation in macromolecular structure and protein dynamics.

Thinh-Phat Cao’s current research focuses on lipid mediated immunity, with a particular emphasis on elucidating the molecular logic driving unconventional T cell activation. His work aims to define how lipid antigens are processed and presented, and how these structural cues are decoded by T cell receptors to shape antigen specific adaptive immune responses.

Using advanced Cryo-EM and X-ray crystallography, he resolves receptor-ligand complexes at near atomic detail, revealing the structural logic that guides lipid specific T cell activation. Thinh-Phat Cao’s structure guided discoveries provide a conceptual and translational platform for the design of innovative immunotherapies, with applications in infectious disease, autoimmunity, and cancer.

His collaborative work published in 2021 (mycobacterial lipid-analogues), earned the Chemistry Biology Interface Horizon Prize from the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2025 for its contribution toward developing an effective vaccine against deadly tuberculosis. In this study, he determined high‑resolution protein-lipid complex structures that guided the design of lipid analogues for a tuberculosis vaccine candidate.

His recent first‑author publication in Nature Communications redefined long-standing assumptions about antigen presentation that had persisted for more than 30 years. In this study, he elucidated the structural mechanisms underlying an unprecedented antigen-presentation topology to T cells by a member of the lipid-antigen-presenting CD1 family. This work has opened new pathways for future dianogstic tools and targeted therapeutic development.