WEHI researcher wins innovation prize for targeted COPD drug delivery

Dr Jan Schaefer sits at the intersection of two worlds—the careful, methodical one of academic research and the faster-moving realm of commercial innovation. As a research officer at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, he studies how infectious and inflammatory diseases ravage the lungs, but his real passion lies in a specific problem: how to slip medicine past the body's defenses and into the exact cells that need it most.

That problem is chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, a progressive condition that has quietly become a global burden, affecting millions of people as their lungs lose function year after year. The disease works through a cruel mechanism: immune cells called macrophages, which normally protect the lungs from invaders, become part of the problem themselves, driving inflammation and tissue damage. Schaefer's insight was elegant in its precision. Rather than flooding the entire body with drugs, why not design nanoparticles small enough to slip directly into those specific macrophages and deliver RNA therapies right where they're needed? The approach promises to minimize side effects while maximizing therapeutic effect—the kind of targeted precision that modern medicine keeps reaching for but rarely achieves.

In 2025, Schaefer's work caught the attention of WEHI's InnoVision competition, an entrepreneurship program designed to take research ideas born in the lab and transform them into something the world can actually use. Among six strong projects, his won. The recognition came with more than just prestige. The prize included a travel stipend that opened doors: invitations to present at academic conferences, access to industry summits and events, and something harder to quantify but perhaps more valuable—a bridge between the academic world he knew and the commercial world he was learning to navigate.

That bridge didn't appear by accident. Schaefer credits two mentors who shaped his trajectory in different ways. Dr Marcel Doerflinger, his former lab mentor and now lab head, taught him how to think like a scientist and gave him the technical foundation to build on. But it was Dr Lee Booty, a WEHI alumnus who had spent time working in industry before returning to the institute as a venture principal scientist, who helped him understand how to position academic research for the real world—how to talk about it, how to package it, how to make it legible to people outside the lab. That kind of translation work is often invisible, but it's essential.

Schaefer's path to this moment wasn't straightforward. He started his PhD remotely in Germany while Australian borders were sealed during COVID-19, beginning his project without his research team around him, without the daily conversations and spontaneous collaborations that make science feel less lonely. It was a test of resolve, and he passed it. What he discovered at WEHI, once he could finally arrive in person, was a research environment built on the assumption that good science happens when people help each other. That collaborative ethos—the willingness of colleagues to offer feedback, share experience, make introductions—became part of how he worked.

Now, with the InnoVision prize in hand and a growing network of industry contacts, Schaefer stands at a threshold. The nanoparticle technology he's developed remains a research project, but it's no longer just that. It's a venture idea with institutional backing, mentor support, and a clearer path toward the clinic. For the millions of people living with COPD, watching their lung function decline year by year, the distance between a promising lab result and an actual treatment is still vast. But Schaefer's work represents the kind of precision-medicine thinking that might, eventually, narrow that gap.