Exeter leads the way on fungal research to save 2.5 million lives a year
Microscopic fungal pathogens are now being studied by academics
Fungal diseases kill 2.5 million people each year and now an international collaboration - led by the University of Exeter - has been awarded £4.5 million to help improve our understanding of them.
The funding, from Wellcome, will 'enable researchers to develop bioimaging tools to visualise the fundamental biology of microscopic fungal pathogens, and to provide training for researchers at the forefront of these diseases'.
The team brings together experts from the University of Exeter, the University of Edinburgh, and the University of Cape Town. They are all part of the Mycology Bioimaging Initiative, an international collaboration of researchers working to understand pathogenic fungi.
During the six and 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 is the Mycology Bioimaging Initiative team lead and 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.”
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 over the last two decades, meaning scientists urgently need fundamental research to allow improved diagnostics and help identify new drug targets.
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.”