Michael Julian’s young life and early adulthood were characterised by bouts of piercing pain and hospitalisations, the result of a debilitating inherited inflammatory immune disease that also afflicted his father and his aunt.

While his condition had a name – tumour necrosis factor receptor-associated periodic syndrome, or TRAPS for short – it wasn’t until he was 35 and walked through the door of Dr Charlotte Slade, a clinical immunologist based at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, that there was a possibility of relief.