£4.5 million to tackle deadly fungal disease

The funding will enable researchers to develop bioimaging tools to visualise the biology of fungal pathogens, and provide training for researchers at the forefront of these diseases.

Fungal diseases are a growing global health threat, particularly in low-income and middle-income countries. 6.5 million people are infected each year, but little is known about how fungi cause disease.

New fungal pathogens have repeatedly emerged over the last 20 years, meaning scientists urgently need fundamental research to develop improved diagnostics and identify new drug targets.

The team, led by the University of Exeter, brings together experts from the University of Edinburgh and the University of Cape Town.

They are all part of the Mycology Bioimaging Initiative (MBI), an international collaboration of researchers working to understand pathogenic fungi.

During the six and half year project, funded by Wellcome, the team will focus on fungal species identified by the World Health Organization as Priority Pathogens - Mucorales, Candida glabrata, Emergomyces fungal pathogens and Cryptococcal.

They will develop bioimaging tools for these poorly understood species and disseminate these tools to the global research community through training and researcher exchanges.

The team will focus initially on these four species, developing bioimaging tools, including microfluidics, fluorescent reporters, and computational pipelines to allow scientific insight. 

The invasive Mucorales species cause devastating mucormycosis, including an outbreak in 2021 among 40,000 patients suffering from Covid.

Mucormycosis is a rare but serious fungal infection that mainly affects people with weakened immune systems. The disease can be fatal if not treated quickly.

The team -  including Professor Peter Swain, Dr Ivan Clark and Dr Edward Wallace based in the Centre for Engineering Biology at the School of Biological Sciences - will also develop tools for the drug-resistant species Candida glabrata, which causes bloodstream infections.

They will develop engineering-inspired approaches to making subcellular events visible using fluorescent protein reporters and watching the growth of fungal cells in microfluidic “traps”.

Emergomyces fungal pathogens were first reported in 2013 in South Africa and now cause skin and systemic infections across the globe. 

Finally, Cryptococcal infections of the brain are a leading cause of HIV/AIDS-related death and disability globally, yet there is little understanding about how this fungus damages the brain. 

A key challenge for scientists has been the lack of tools for emerging pathogens, and lack of access to tools that have been developed.

This award will resource Africa Mycology Bioimaging labs and scientists with sample preparation, image capture, and image analysis training.

The Initiative will grow a network of workshop trainees who will benefit from research exchanges between sites of fungal disease burden and sites of advanced bioimaging technologies.

The MBI will run annual workshops in Mycology Bioimaging across sites to build this important network year-on-year.

School of Biological Sciences

University of Exeter press release

University of Cape Town