An international collaboration led by the University of Exeter has received £4.5m in funding to enhance the understanding of fungal diseases that claim the lives of 2.5 million people each year.
This grant, awarded by Wellcome, will allow researchers to develop bioimaging tools to visualise the fundamental biology of microscopic fungal pathogens and will facilitate training for researchers at the forefront of studying these diseases.
The team consists of experts from the University of Exeter, the University of Edinburgh and the University of Cape Town.
Together, they are part of the Mycology Bioimaging Initiative, a global consortium of researchers dedicated to understanding pathogenic fungi.
During the six-and-a-half-year project, the Mycology Bioimaging Initiative will focus on fungal species identified by the World Health Organization as Priority Pathogens.
Dr Elizabeth Ballou from the University of Exeter's Medical Research Council Centre for Medical Mycology and Mycology Bioimaging Initiative team lead, said: "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.
Why this matters
Fungal pathogens infect 6.5 million people each year, but very little is known about how they cause disease.
New fungal pathogens have also repeatedly emerged during the last two decades, underscoring the urgent need for fundamental research to enable improved diagnostics and identify new drug targets.
The Mycology Bioimaging Initiative aims to develop specialised bioimaging tools for poorly understood fungal species and share them with the global research community through training and researcher exchanges.
The team will initially focus on four species, creating tools such as microfluidics, fluorescent reporters and computational pipelines.
They will address invasive Mucorales species, which caused a significant mucormycosis outbreak among 40,000 COVID-19 patients in 2021, as well as the drug-resistant species Candida glabrata, known for bloodstream infections.
Professor Peter Swain from the University of Edinburgh added: "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.
The Edinburgh team, also including Dr Ivan Clark and Dr Edward Wallace and based in the Centre for Engineering Biology at the School of Biological Sciences, will be developing engineering-inspired approaches to making subcellular events visible using fluorescent protein reporters and to 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 worldwide.
Professor Claire Hoving, of the University of Cape Town and the CMM AFRICA Unit, Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine, said: "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."
Cryptococcal infections of the brain are a leading cause of HIV/AIDS-related death and disability globally, yet we still understand remarkably little about how this fungus damages the brain.
Professor Rachael Dangarembizi of the University of Cape Town's Neuroscience Institute and CMM AFRICA Unit said: "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."
A major challenge for scientists is the limited availability of tools for emerging pathogens.
This award will support Africa Mycology Bioimaging labs and scientists by providing training in sample preparation, image capture and analysis.
The initiative will create a network of trainees who will engage in research exchanges between regions affected by fungal diseases and those with advanced bioimaging technologies.
Darren Thomson, who leads the Initiative's training in applied Mycology Bioimaging, said: "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.”
The MBI will run annual workshops in Mycology Bioimaging across sites to build this important network year on year.
Dr Ballou adds: "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.