Removing Barriers to Fungal Bioimaging for the Global Medical Mycology Community

Human fungal pathogens cause 2.5 million deaths each year, primarily in low and middle income (LMIC) countries. To help address this, the WHO identified 20 Priority Fungal Pathogens requiring urgent fundamental research. The majority of these pathogens are not well studied simply because the global research community lacks the tools and infrastructure to do so. One such tool is advanced bioimaging, which can enable dynamic, live, quantitative, single-cell analysis of fungal pathogens in conditions relevant to  infection. Yet molecular, technological, analytical and expertise barriers prevent the global medical mycology community from accessing major new bioimaging advances.  

Leveraging an international collaborative team including medical mycologists, engineering biologists, and imaging experts from the Universities of Exeter, Cape Town, and Edinburgh, we will address these barriers in three aims: 1) A Pan-fungal molecular bioimaging toolbox; 2) Bespoke, affordable, single cell imaging chambers; and 3) Robust high throughput image analysis pipelines. This will be underpinned by an advanced training course to be run at the University of Cape Town in 2025, specifically open to African medical mycologists. Here, we will disseminate tools and knowledge gained to enable advanced bioimaging of Priority Fungal Pathogens.  

Our hope is that this program will broaden access to advanced bioimaging tools across fungal pathogens and build fungal bioimaging expertise in Africa. Long term, we hope to enable uptake by African and global researchers to address questions driven by needs across the medical mycology community, including basic biology, pathogenesis, and antifungal resistance mechanisms. Addressing these technological barriers simultaneously and ensuring uptake by African scientists and the global medical mycology community will propel the study of fungal pathogens to the forefront of modern bioimaging.