WHERE QUEENSLAND BEGINS.

There is a particular kind of knowledge that only arrives through proximity to the land and the life it sustains. The diseases that shaped Queensland’s early medical history were not abstractions imported from European textbooks; they emerged from the specific conditions of a subtropical colony — from the abattoirs on the city fringe, from the cane fields of the tropical north, from the tick-covered hides of cattle moving between stations and saleyards. They were diseases born of place, and the institution that eventually arose to study them was born of the same necessity.

QIMR Berghofer, established in 1945 as the Queensland Institute of Medical Research, was the brainchild of Dr Edward Derrick, then director of the Queensland State Health Department Laboratory of Microbiology and Pathology, whose work on Q fever, scrub typhus and leptospirosis made him acutely aware of the need for an institute devoted to full-time research into infectious diseases of northern Australia. That awareness was not the product of academic ambition alone. It had been earned through years of direct confrontation with pathogens that were killing and incapacitating Queensland workers, and it carried with it the particular urgency of a scientist who had already seen what happened when such diseases went unstudied.

Originally intended to conduct research into tropical diseases in North Queensland, QIMR Berghofer now conducts research into cancers, infectious diseases, mental health and chronic disorders. That expansion of mission is a mark of institutional maturity, not institutional drift. But the infectious disease program — the work that justified the institute’s creation — has never been set aside. It remains, eight decades on, among the most consequential strands of scientific activity carried out anywhere in Queensland. And it remains, in its deepest character, a response to the ecology of this specific part of the world.

THE QUERY THAT BECAME A DISEASE WITH A GLOBAL NAME.

The story of Q fever is in part the story of a naming decision made with unusual civic delicacy. Q fever was first described in 1935 by Edward Holbrook Derrick in slaughterhouse workers in Brisbane, Queensland. The “Q” stands for “query” and was applied at a time when the causative agent was unknown. It was chosen over suggestions of “abattoir fever” and “Queensland rickettsial fever,” to avoid directing negative connotations at either the cattle industry or the state of Queensland. In this small etymological choice, Derrick demonstrated a kind of institutional restraint — the instinct of a scientist aware that naming a disease after a place or an industry carried consequences beyond the laboratory.

In 1935, Derrick became aware of an outbreak of disease among Brisbane abattoir workers, with symptoms resembling a lengthy attack of flu or a mild bout of typhoid. It could be fatal. He conducted experiments with animal models injected with the infected blood of patients and, after a year’s work, became the first person to identify Q fever as a distinct disease. But while Derrick knew the condition was somehow contracted from animals going to slaughter, and that the infective agent of the fever was present in the spleen, he was unable to determine the micro-organism responsible or work out how it got to the abattoirs.

That task fell partly to others. The pathogen of Q fever was discovered in 1937, when Frank Macfarlane Burnet and Mavis Freeman isolated the bacterium from one of Derrick’s patients. It was originally identified as a species of Rickettsia. Derrick and his colleagues showed that the microbe was a natural infection of bandicoots, whose ticks transferred it to cattle. The cattle tick conveyed it from cow to cow. Eventually, simultaneous work in the United States led researchers to the same organism from a different direction entirely, and the pathogen was renamed Coxiella burnetii, a name that forever honours two of the early pioneers.

What is remarkable about this history is not simply that Queensland scientists were at the centre of a global infectious disease discovery, but that the discovery itself was made possible by the specific biological conditions of Queensland — the particular relationship between bandicoots, cattle ticks and abattoir workers in a subtropical colony still learning to manage the consequences of its own agricultural economy. The science was local before it became universal. Derrick’s work on Q fever, scrub typhus and leptospirosis made him aware of the need for an institute devoted to full-time research into infectious diseases of northern Australia, and his pioneering research from 1935 onwards into Q fever led to the discovery of the causative rickettsia Coxiella burnetii. That discovery was the intellectual foundation upon which QIMR was built, and it remains embedded in the institution’s identity.

FOUNDING DIRECTORS AND THE MALARIA INHERITANCE.

The institute that Derrick’s persistence brought into existence in 1945 was shaped from the outset by the dual preoccupations of its early leadership. The first Director of QIMR was Dr Ian Mackerras, an entomologist who, during World War II, had been responsible, with others, for much of the malaria control work of the Australian Army. The complementary aims, interests and expertise of Mackerras and Derrick — who succeeded Mackerras as Director in 1961 — were to shape the research direction and impact of QIMR for the next thirty years.

This is not an incidental biographical detail. The choice of Mackerras as founding director embedded a particular methodological orientation into the institution from its earliest days: the understanding that infectious disease research, to be effective, had to grapple not just with the pathogen but with the ecology of its transmission — the vectors, the hosts, the environmental conditions that permitted or frustrated outbreak. A malaria expert who had spent the war years tracking mosquito populations across the Pacific theatre was, by temperament and training, a systems thinker. That systems thinking became a persistent institutional characteristic.

From 1951 to 1965, at a field station in North Queensland, QIMR researchers investigated outbreaks of leptospirosis, scrub typhus, dengue and other tropical fevers. The institute established a field station at the Innisfail hospital in North Queensland to learn more about the tropical diseases occurring in the local area, with particular interest in leptospirosis — known as Weil’s disease or the “cane cutters’ curse” — scrub typhus and dengue fever. An outbreak of dengue fever in North Queensland in 1954 heightened the need for research into arboviral diseases, and within five years of the Innisfail field station opening, enough had been learnt to improve diagnosis and treatment.

The accumulation of knowledge was not merely academic. Each discovery fed directly into improvements in clinical practice and public health management. This translational ambition — the insistence that laboratory findings must ultimately reach patients — has remained a defining characteristic of QIMR Berghofer’s infectious disease work ever since.

ARBOVIRUSES AND THE ECOLOGY OF ENDEMIC THREAT.

One of the most consequential chapters in Queensland’s infectious disease history was written not in a single dramatic discovery but in the patient accumulation of arboviral knowledge across several decades. In 1960, QIMR scientists isolated Murray Valley encephalitis virus from mosquitoes, which paved the way for the discovery of other arboviruses, including Ross River virus in 1963. Ross River virus was discovered by a team led by Professor Ralph Doherty and named after the site near Townsville from which the mosquitoes were originally collected. Further research into Ross River virus confirmed it to be the main cause of epidemic polyarthritis — painfully swollen joints and muscles, extreme tiredness, fever and a raised red rash.

During the second half of the twentieth century, NHMRC-funded researchers at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research made major contributions to the understanding of arboviruses, enabling clinicians to quickly identify infections in patients and public health authorities to better manage the threats that the viruses pose to health. During those years, the team at QIMR isolated more than thirty different arboviruses from arthropods collected in Australia. Many of these were the first reports of these viruses in Australia and most were new to science. QIMR Berghofer’s Mosquito Control Laboratory continues to work on surveillance tools, transmission pathways, public health risks and disease mitigation.

Ross River virus is the most common human arbovirus infection in Australia, causing significant morbidity and substantial medical costs; about half of all Australian cases occur in Queensland. This is not historical burden — it is present and ongoing. The Queensland climate, which made the state peculiarly susceptible to arboviral diseases in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, continues to sustain transmission cycles that affect thousands of Queenslanders each year. In Queensland, the Mosquito and Arbovirus Research Committee, initiated through a collaboration between QIMR Berghofer and local and state government, helps direct and prioritise operational research relevant to mosquito and arbovirus surveillance and control.

Arboviral diseases are an increasing problem in Australia and internationally. In March 2022, the WHO launched the Global Arbovirus Initiative, noting the increasing frequency and magnitude of outbreaks of arbovirus disease as a consequence of climate change and other factors. The institute that first isolated Ross River virus in the 1960s now sits within a global conversation about how warming temperatures, shifting rainfall patterns and the expansion of mosquito ranges will reshape the geography of vector-borne disease across the coming decades.

MALARIA: FROM CONTROL WORK TO GOLD-STANDARD TRIALS.

If Q fever represents QIMR Berghofer’s foundational contribution to the understanding of a disease born in Queensland, then malaria represents its most internationally significant ongoing scientific commitment. The connection runs deep — through the founding director’s wartime career, through the institute’s earliest operational research, through decades of field work and laboratory science — and it has culminated in a research capability that is genuinely rare in global terms.

The Infectious Diseases Program at QIMR Berghofer works to develop drugs, vaccines, and prevention and education strategies against globally important diseases caused by parasites, bacteria and viruses. The institute’s specialist labs have an international reputation in malaria volunteer infection studies and test new anti-malaria drugs for deployment in the developing world.

The centrepiece of that reputation is the Controlled Human Malaria Infection platform, known as CHMI. CHMI is widely considered a gold-standard model for early clinical evaluation of antimalarial drugs and vaccines in a controlled human setting, providing critical human data to guide decision-making before advancing to large-scale field trials. The Clinical Malaria Group conducts blood-stage controlled human malaria infection studies in healthy volunteers to evaluate the safety and efficacy of candidate anti-malarials.

The scientific pedigree of this platform traces directly to the Queensland Institute of Medical Research. Blood-stage CHMI was originally developed in Australia at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research, using cryopreserved stocks of erythrocytes from two parasitemic donors who were deliberately infected with P. falciparum 3D7 via mosquito bite. This material has now been administered intravenously to more than three hundred volunteers in numerous studies with diverse endpoints.

The controlled human malaria infection model has been used to evaluate more than ten investigational medicinal products. Models have been established for both an artemisinin-sensitive and an artemisinin-resistant P. falciparum strain, and for other Plasmodium species including P. vivax, P. malariae and P. knowlesi. The model has also enabled studies to evaluate transmission-blocking interventions and exploratory studies to evaluate immunological and pathophysiological responses to infection.

The significance of drug resistance research within this program cannot be overstated. Research at QIMR Berghofer focuses on investigating biological and molecular changes that enable malaria parasites to escape diagnostic detection or anti-malarial drug treatment, their epidemiology, evolution and impact to global and defence health. The laboratory identified mutant parasites that cause malaria rapid diagnostic test failure and investigated mechanisms and evolution of drug resistance in malaria parasites. Over the years, the work has made significant contributions to elucidating mechanisms of chloroquine, atovaquone, pyrimethamine and sulfadoxine resistance. In more recent years, the laboratory has investigated artemisinin-induced dormancy and artemisinin treatment failure.

These are not narrow technical questions. Artemisinin-based combination therapies are currently the first line of treatment for malaria across much of the world. Understanding why they sometimes fail, and identifying the molecular mechanisms by which resistance develops and spreads, is among the most urgent tasks in global infectious disease research. QIMR Berghofer’s contribution to this field has been both foundational and ongoing. The institute’s work evaluates and improves diagnostics for malaria and arboviral infections, both in the laboratory and in the field, and investigates the emergence, evolution and epidemiology of mutant malaria parasites causing malaria rapid diagnostic test failure, to inform diagnosis and case management policies.

QIMR Berghofer has uncovered the role of specific immune cells in providing protection against malaria, offering new insights into potential therapeutic strategies. These findings represent the kind of basic science discovery — identifying precisely which elements of the immune system confer protection — that is necessary before any rational vaccine design can proceed. The clinical trials platform and the fundamental immunology work are not separate programs; they are two phases of a single integrated effort to reduce the global burden of a disease that continues to cause hundreds of thousands of deaths each year.

THE BREADTH OF EMERGING THREATS: HELMINTHS, SCABIES AND VIRAL PATHOGENS.

Malaria and Q fever represent the historical anchors of QIMR Berghofer’s infectious disease identity, but the program’s contemporary scope extends considerably further. The institute conducts research into infectious diseases such as HIV, malaria, group A streptococcus, Epstein-Barr virus, Ross River virus, scabies, dengue fever and schistosomiasis. Each of these represents a different kind of challenge: some are endemic to Queensland, some are regional, some are global; some are ancient diseases now understood in molecular detail, others are emerging threats shaped by new ecological and demographic conditions.

QIMR Berghofer has a distinguished history studying viruses and uses this knowledge to develop new treatments, as well as cellular therapies for cancer and diseases of the central nervous system. The institute has a strong record in vector control and works on innovations in mosquito surveillance and measures to interrupt pathogen transmission, and delivers a strong helminth control program resulting in major public health gains. The institute’s dedicated scabies laboratory researches this neglected disease that disproportionately affects its Indigenous population.

QIMR Berghofer has created a new diagnostic tool for schistosomiasis, a parasitic infection that affects more than 200 million people globally. This work on neglected tropical diseases — diseases that attract relatively little pharmaceutical research investment precisely because they are concentrated in low-income settings — is among the most important, if least publicised, work conducted at the institute. The helminth program and the scabies research represent a sustained commitment to diseases that disproportionately burden Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in Queensland and Pacific communities more broadly. It is science oriented not toward marketable conditions but toward the most vulnerable populations.

The institute’s Emerging Viral Diseases Laboratory extends this reach into novel territory. The QIMR Berghofer Emerging Viral Diseases Laboratory is one of the few Australian institutes offering contract research and development for high-containment respiratory and vector-borne viruses in its certified, state-of-the-art PC3 Facility. That certification — maintaining a physical containment level 3 facility — is not a bureaucratic detail. It is what allows the institute to work with dangerous pathogens under appropriately rigorous conditions, and it is what made QIMR Berghofer a natural partner for pandemic response research when SARS-CoV-2 arrived in 2020.

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the capacity of groups within the Infectious Diseases Program to adapt their research to quickly tackle new problems. Over $1.6 million from generous donors was allocated to various projects addressing pressing needs, including the establishment of a core facility to grow SARS-CoV-2 virus and test new COVID-19 drugs and vaccines. The institute also developed the first robust spatial multiomics technological platform, enabling comprehensive studies of COVID-19 and flu virus infections and immune responses in human lung tissue. The pandemic accelerated capabilities that will remain relevant to whatever pathogen emerges next — and there will be a next one.

AN INTEGRATED ARCHITECTURE OF SURVEILLANCE AND RESPONSE.

What distinguishes QIMR Berghofer’s approach to infectious disease from that of a narrowly focused research laboratory is the degree to which its different programs constitute something approaching a coherent surveillance and response architecture. The Mosquito Control Laboratory is not simply studying mosquitoes in isolation; it is feeding into public health management strategies that directly influence how Queensland local governments manage breeding sites and outbreak risk. The clinical malaria platform is not simply evaluating drugs for pharmaceutical sponsors; it is building a body of knowledge about parasite biology and immune response that informs treatment guidelines for national health systems in malaria-endemic countries. The scabies laboratory is not simply cataloguing the biology of a skin mite; it is working toward interventions that can meaningfully reduce the burden of a condition that is deeply entangled with the broader health disadvantage experienced by remote Indigenous communities.

QIMR Berghofer’s infectious diseases researchers continue to adapt their research to meet new challenges presented by established and emerging pathogens, develop innovative approaches to prevent, treat and eliminate disease, and work toward the interruption of pathogen transmission across diverse settings.

This integration is made possible partly by the institute’s location within the Herston Health Precinct, where proximity to the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital means that researchers work alongside clinical colleagues who are managing the conditions being studied. The precinct co-locates QIMR Berghofer, the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital, the Surgical Treatment and Rehabilitation Service, and the University of Queensland Centre for Clinical Research. The movement of knowledge between the laboratory bench and the clinical ward, never straightforward in medical research, is at least structurally facilitated by that co-location. A researcher working on antimalarial drug candidates in the morning can discuss their findings with an infectious diseases physician managing returning travellers in the afternoon.

The institute has conducted operational research including molecular epidemiology and surveillance of malaria in collaboration with country Ministries of Health, NGOs and the WHO. The outcomes inform country health policies and significantly improved diagnosis and treatment of malaria. These international collaborations — with governments, with global health agencies, with the Australian Defence Force’s Malaria and Infectious Disease Institute — mean that the work conducted in laboratories on Herston Road reaches into the malaria clinics of Papua New Guinea, into the treatment protocols of Pacific Island nations, into the surveillance systems of health ministries across Southeast Asia.

PERMANENCE, PLACE AND THE LONG VIEW.

There is a temptation, in accounts of scientific institutions, to frame their histories as a series of dramatic discoveries — the eureka moments, the pivotal publications, the breakthrough findings that make the front pages. QIMR Berghofer’s infectious disease program has produced its share of such moments. The original description of Q fever, the isolation of Ross River virus, the development of the blood-stage CHMI model — these are genuine intellectual landmarks. But the more truthful account of what such an institution represents is less dramatic and more durable: the accumulated capacity to respond to whatever the ecology of this region and this era produces next.

Queensland’s geography has always made it a frontier for infectious disease. Its tropical north, its agricultural industries, its proximity to the island nations of the Pacific and to the disease-endemic regions of Southeast Asia — all of these conditions conspire to make Queensland, in a sense, a permanently hazardous place for pathogens to enter and circulate. The institute that was created in 1945 to study that hazard, born from the specific problem of Brisbane abattoir workers falling ill with a fever of unknown origin, has grown across eight decades into a research institution of international standing. Its infectious disease program is not merely a department; it is a living record of everything Queensland has learned, at some cost, about the biology of organisms that threaten human health.

QIMR Berghofer is marking its 80th anniversary in 2025. Through the vision of its founders and pioneering scientists, the institute has made a significant contribution to the world-renowned reputation of Queensland-based research and continues to make a real impact on the future of health. That impact is grounded not in any single discovery but in the maintenance of a research capacity — the laboratories, the clinical platforms, the vector surveillance networks, the international collaborations — that can turn to face whatever threat the next outbreak, the next resistant pathogen or the next pandemic presents.

The Queensland Foundation project, in assigning the namespace qimr.queensland as the permanent onchain address for the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute, recognises that such institutions carry civic meaning that transcends any individual program or period of funding. The infectious disease research conducted at Herston is not merely a service delivered to Queenslanders; it is part of the ongoing civic project of understanding and maintaining the health of this place and its people, and of fulfilling obligations of care to the regional communities whose wellbeing is bound up with Queensland’s own.

When the history of pandemic preparedness is written for this part of the world — when the question is asked how the Asia-Pacific region managed to develop the scientific infrastructure capable of responding to emerging viral threats — QIMR Berghofer’s eighty years of infectious disease research will be recognised as a foundational chapter. The institute that arose from Edward Derrick’s investigation of sick abattoir workers in 1935, that sent field researchers into the tropical north to study scrub typhus and dengue, that developed blood-stage malaria trials used by researchers across the world, that maintains a PC3 containment facility capable of working with the next dangerous pathogen before most institutions have identified it — that institute deserves a permanent civic address commensurate with the permanence of its contribution. The namespace qimr.queensland is one way of holding that institutional identity stable, legible and anchored to the place from which this science has always drawn its deepest purpose.