Posted by Holly Wright
4 August 2025A team of leading infectious disease scientists from academia and industry have been awarded £17.9 million to identify new drugs to treat fungal infections.
The Wellcome funded project will see researchers based at the University of Dundee, collaborate with the Global Health team, at the global biopharma company GSK, and the Centre for Medical Mycology, at University of Exeter.
This five-year project seeks to identify new antifungal treatments, with an initial focus on Cryptococcus neoformans, a deadly fungus causing meningitis, and Candida auris, which is thought to be the first human pathogenic fungus to have emerged as a result of climate change.
With a very limited drug development pipeline, increasing resistance and poor diagnostics for many fungal pathogens, there is an urgent need to find new, widely-applicable, ways of eliminating fungi.
The initial goal of this project is to generate two new pre-clinical drug candidates for cryptococcal meningitis, ideally with broad-spectrum antifungal potential within low- and middle-income settings.
Cryptococcal meningitis is a very serious and frequently deadly disease which mainly affects people with compromised immune systems.
It is one of the main causes of death for people who are living with HIV, leading to approximately 180,000 deaths every year, according to the World Health Organisation.
Dr Manu De Rycker, Head of Pathogen Biology at Drug Discovery Unit (DDU), University of Dundee said, “While Cryptococcus fungi are found everywhere in the environment, for most people their immune system effectively controls the fungus.
“In immunocompromised patients, the fungus is able to travel in the bloodstream to the brain, where it causes meningitis and high mortality rates.
“Treatments are available but they’re long, complicated, not fit for purpose in sub-Saharan Africa, where most of the cases are, and accessibility can be an issue.”
In addition, the project will seek to identify drug compounds with broad-spectrum activity, in particular against the often drug-resistant fungus Candida auris, which was first discovered in 2009 in Japan.
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