Associate Professor Alec Redwood holds a B.Sc. (Hons) and PhD in Immunology and is a translational immunologist with expertise in vaccine design, virus–host interactions, and antigen-specific T-cell immunity. His research focuses on antigen discovery and the development of novel vaccine and immunotherapy strategies in settings of complex or constrained immune responses.
Dr Redwood has led internationally competitive research programs in cytomegalovirus (CMV) biology and vaccine vector development and holds multiple national and international grants and patents. He previously led a large multidisciplinary team at the University of Western Australia (UWA) within the Pest Animal Control Cooperative Research Centre (PAC-CRC), where his group developed disseminating CMV-based vaccine vectors to control invasive pest species. These proof-of-concept studies were among the first to demonstrate the potential of CMVs as highly effective and durable vaccine platforms and helped establish CMV as a viable vector system for infectious disease and cancer applications.
Dr Redwood currently heads the Vaccines and Viral Immunity Group at the Institute of Respiratory Health, UWA, and leads the neoantigen discovery and immune monitoring program at the National Centre for Asbestos Related Diseases (NCARD). At NCARD, his research is directed toward the development of therapeutic cancer vaccines for asbestos-related malignancies, particularly mesothelioma. His program integrates tumour genomics, immunopeptidomics, and single-cell immune profiling to identify tumour-specific neoantigens and to define the quality and durability of neoantigen-specific CD8⁺ T-cell responses in patients. This work directly supports the design, immune monitoring, and clinical translation of personalised and shared neoantigen vaccines. Dr Redwood is a co-administrator of the ATTAC clinical trial, linking laboratory discovery with early-phase clinical neoantigen vaccine trials in patients with lung cancer.