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How have fungal pathogens evolved immune evasion strategies to aid their survival in the host?

Newly funded research will help identify new drug targets by improving understanding of how the fungal pathogen Candida albicans subverts immune response.

9 August 2024•2 min read
Macrophages and fungi

University of Birmingham’s Dr Rebecca Drummond has won a Wellcome Discovery Award, as a co-applicant in collaboration with Dr Rebecca Hall from the University of Kent, to better understand how the fungal pathogen Candida albicans adapts to the host and evades immune responses.

The award, to the value of £2.9M, will be shared between the two research groups, who have collaborated previously. In this study, the groups will come together to answer an important biological question in fungal biology, how the host environment drives immune evasion of the most predominate human fungal pathogen, Candida albicans.

This fungus is a predominant cause of mucosal and life-threatening systemic infection. However, it has a remarkable ability to shield itself from the immune system. It is hoped that the work will lead to the identification of new therapeutic targets which can be exploited to restore immune recognition and prevent infection.

My lab specialises in antifungal immunity, particularly organ-specific responses, and we aim to establish the in-host signatures that cause fungal immune evasion in different tissues. We’ll use the fungal mutants and tools made in Kent in our clinically-relevant animal models of the fungal infection to discover new drug targets as well as better understand how immune response may be subverted by the fungus.

Dr Rebecca Drummond, Immunology and Immunotherapy, University of Birmingham.

The work will build on research from University of Kent that has identified new triggers for fungal immune evasion and will use expertise from both labs and molecular microbiology techniques to understand the genes and pathways that mediate this immune evasion.

Candida albicans is a fungus that lives in the mouth, intestines and on the skin. It can cause yeast infections like thrush, which are treated with antifungal medications.

Featured staff

  • Dr Rebecca A Drummond

    Birmingham Fellow

    Rebecca Drummond is a fungal immunologist researching mechanisms of immunity that protect us from fungal pathogens, such as Candida albicans and Cryptococcus neoformans.

    Phone: +44 (0)121 414 3006
    Email: r.drummond@bham.ac.uk

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