£4.5 million to tackle deadly fungal disease

An international collaboration has been awarded £4.5 million to help improve understanding of fungal diseases that kill 2.5 million people each year.

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.

Priority Pathogens

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.

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 four species, developing bioimaging tools, including microfluidics, fluorescent reporters, and computational pipelines to allow scientific insight.

Black Fungus

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.

Bloodstream Infections

The team will also develop tools for the drug-resistant species Candida glabrata, which causes bloodstream infections.

The Edinburgh team, including Professor Peter Swain, Dr Ivan Clark and Dr Edward Wallace and based in the Centre for Engineering Biology at the School of Biological Sciences.

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”.

Candida glabrata is an increasingly important cause of infections, particularly in hospitals. We're developing new imaging to watch individual fungal cells as they respond to antifungal drugs in real time. We want to understand why some cells can tolerate treatment while others cannot.

Skin and Systemic Infections

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

Emergomyces are now recognised to cause cutaneous and systemic infections worldwide. Leveraging advanced imaging technologies—supported by locally embedded yet globally connected systems—helps ensure that expertise, diagnostic capacity, and tools remain within the regions most impacted by disease. This approach reduces delays in diagnosis, guides more effective treatment strategies, and ultimately improves health outcomes for vulnerable populations.

Brain Infections

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.

Using advanced light-sheet imaging, our team will develop new tools to visualise Cryptococcus within intact brains, giving us an unprecedented view of how the infection spreads and disrupts the brain during this fatal disease.

Access to Tools

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.

We’re excited to see the network of bench biologists bring more context of the invasive pathogen to the network of clinical based scientists, who in turn, can help guide more disease relevance to the bench scientist's experimental approach.

Fungi cause disease through the act of growing. Growing as invasive filaments, they damage tissue, and growing as single cells, they increase in number and spread. The bioimaging approaches enabled by this project will allow us to study the early events that allow growth, which will be essential to developing new therapeutics and diagnostics.
The team we've built for the MBI is a key strength. We have experts in imaging, data analysis, microfluidics, infection biology, fungal cell biology, engineering biology, and, importantly, open science and training. We are prioritising sharing the tools we develop through annual training workshops and researcher exchanges, and we're very excited to see the wider medical mycology community take up these technologies in their own research.