Tell us an interesting fact about your workplace?
I am lucky enough to work for two institutions with completely complementary vocations. As a professor at the Microbiology Institute of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, I have the opportunity to enjoy a great academic environment focused on generating knowledge and training young scientists. As a scientist at Fiocruz, I have the privilege of working for an institution that houses facilities for manufacturing drugs and vaccines, as well as infectious disease hospitals, veterinary clinics, technological platforms, and research labs, all with the mission of improving the health of the Brazilian population. It is wonderful to have access to the best of two different worlds, and I feel fortunate and honoured to be part of it.
If you had to describe your typical day in 3 words, what would they be?
I have been married for 24 years to Flavia Reis, a great scientist with whom I work at Fiocruz. We have three children—Gabriel, Rafael, and Miguel—and a dog named Didi. Our days typically revolve around the family-work combination: after everyone goes to their schools or university, Flavia and I head to the lab, where we join our group of mycologists. There, I split my time between the group’s scientific activities and coordinating Fiocruz’s Inova Program, one of the institution’s main scientific funding bodies. At the end of the day, we return home to join Gabriel, Rafael, Miguel, and Didi for a well-deserved family time. Therefore, my typical days in three words would be family, work, and fun.
If you could invite 1 special guest to a dinner party who would it be and why?
My friend Leonardo Nimrichter and I, along with many others in Brazil, were fortunate to have Luiz R. Travassos, a pioneer in Brazilian mycology, as one of our mentors. Prof. Travassos was a unique figure; he was an expert in high gastronomy, music, and, of course, science. His scientific contributions were significant in several fields, including parasitology, cancer biology, immunology, and mycology. He taught us everything from the use of the English language to designing the right protocols for investigating fungal pathogens. Based in São Paulo, he welcomed Leonardo and me every year to have our results analysed by him and, of course, to go out for dinner and engage in very productive and entertaining discussions. Prof. Travassos passed away during the pandemic, and we did not have the chance to say goodbye. One last dinner, in honour of the good times we shared, would be absolutely amazing!
If you could have any superpower to help your research, what would it be?
The work of scientists is often highly motivating, driven by the pursuit of knowledge, the discovery of new solutions to pressing problems, and the chance to contribute to the advancement of society. However, this work also comes with many challenges. These challenges are even more pronounced in countries like Brazil and other Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs), where scientists must constantly navigate a complex landscape of political, economic, and infrastructural obstacles. In LMICs, the path to scientific progress is often fraught with difficulties that go beyond the typical hurdles faced by researchers in wealthier nations. One of the major challenges we face in countries like Brazil is the instability in governmental support for science. Scientists in LMICs are highly susceptible to political decisions and government programs that may not prioritize scientific research, or worse, actively undermine it. For example, between 2016 and 2022, Brazil experienced a period of significant attacks against science. During this time, we witnessed radical reductions in the budget allocated to research and the systematic dismantling of an infrastructure that had taken decades to build. These were not minor setbacks but major blows to our capacity to conduct meaningful scientific work, especially in fields that require long-term investment, such as biotechnology, public health, and environmental science. In addition to these political and financial challenges, scientists in LMICs face other barriers that make our work even more difficult. One such barrier is language. For those of us who are not native English speakers, this adds an additional layer of complexity to our work. Another significant challenge is the limited access to high-level infrastructure and the slow procurement of essential materials. Even when funding is available, the process of purchasing reagents, equipment, or other essential supplies is often hindered by bureaucratic delays, import restrictions, or high costs. These challenges all occur within a broader socio-economic context that imposes additional difficulties on scientists in LMICs. The superpower that I, and many others in my position, would wish for is simple to explain but incredibly difficult to realize: we would like to transform our scientific reality into one that is truly inclusive and provides the necessary conditions to investigate the relevant questions in our fields of work.
What is one surprising fact about you that most people don’t know?
In fact, there are two facts about me that most people probably don’t know. First, I wake up every day by 5:30 in the morning to cook. Our family is large, and to put it politely, our kids eat well and in considerable quantities. So every day, I get up early to prepare lunch before heading out to work. The other fact is that until recently, my fellow scientists and I in Rio de Janeiro had a rock band that would be called “Super Ordinary” in English. I used to play (very badly) electric guitar in the band. With the move of our lab to Curitiba, I stopped playing, but the band remains active. It was amusing to see how they improved after I left.
How did you get in to Science, specifically AMR?
I started in science as a Biotechnology technician in 1991 at the Microbiology Institute of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), in Brazil. The laboratory where I worked studied carbohydrates and lipids produced by pathogenic fungi, and that’s how I began working in the field of medical mycology. I stayed at UFRJ as a student, initially undergraduate, then pursuing a master’s and PhD, always studying pathogenic fungi. I became a professor at the Microbiology Institute of UFRJ in 2002, when I started my independent research group, aiming to understand secretion mechanisms in the pathogen Cryptococcus neoformans. In 2012, I also started working at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), which was crucial for me to understand the great impact fungi have on public health and the need to develop tools to combat fungal infections. We began searching for new drugs and structures with therapeutic potential, and today we are studying a peptide with great potential to mitigate the negative impact that antimicrobial resistance has on the treatment of fungal diseases.
What is the most exciting discovery you have made in your research so far?
In 2005, I received a fellowship from the American Society for Microbiology to visit Arturo Casadevall’s laboratory in New York, USA. At the time, I was working with lipids present in the cell walls of fungi as therapeutic targets, and my visit to Arturo’s lab aimed to develop monoclonal antibodies against these lipids. The project completely failed, which led us to explore other possibilities. I actually recall Arturo saying: well, you are already here, so find something else to do…This exploration made us question whether the lipids present in the fungal cell wall could transfer to the extracellular environment. Thanks to this question, we identified fungal extracellular vesicles in fungi for the first time, in collaboration with my colleague and great friend Leonardo Nimrichter in Brazil. This was unquestionably my major scientific discovery. At the time, there were many doubts about the existence of these structures, but several subsequent studies by our groups and others confirmed the presence of extracellular vesicles in dozens of fungi. More importantly, these structures were shown to have enormous biological, vaccine, and therapeutic potential. This discovery gained institutional recognition: in 2023, Guilhem Janbon from France, Robin May from the UK, and I established an international research unit of the Institut Pasteur, titled “Fungal Extracellular Vesicles,” where we combine our expertise to understand how these structures impact fungal diseases.
How do you think antifungal resistance will impact our daily lives in the future?
AMR is not only a health issue; it is a socioeconomic problem as well. For instance, the World Bank estimates that AMR could result in an additional US$1 trillion in healthcare costs by 2050 and US$1 trillion to US$3.4 trillion in gross domestic product (GDP) losses per year by 2030 (source: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/antimicrobial-resistance). According to the WHO, bacterial AMR was directly responsible for 1.27 million global deaths in 2019 and contributed to 4.95 million deaths. For fungi, we do not have precise data, but many reports highlight the emergence of antifungal resistance as a major cause of treatment failure in fungal diseases. It is important to remember that we have few antifungals available, and even those we do have may not be accessible in regions with socioeconomic restrictions. That said, we won’t have to wait for the future to witness the terrible impact that antifungal resistance will have on human and animal health—unfortunately, it is already happening. We have recently learned just how dangerous it is to contract infections caused by Candida auris, a fungus that emerged only a few years ago, already associated with high mortality rates and a clear pattern of resistance to several antifungal agents. In various regions of the world, severe clinical cases caused by Cryptococcus are resistant to treatment with azoles. As pointed out by the U.S. CDC and a vast body of literature, the genus Aspergillus and several other species of Candida are also directly linked to antifungal resistance, as are certain dermatophytes (fungi causing ringworm). Without new alternatives, the situation will only worsen, and the millions of annual deaths already caused by pathogenic fungi will increase. No one—doctors or patients—will want to find themselves in a situation where they are facing a known disease but with no available treatments. The time to act is not in the future; it’s now.
What keeps you motivated when research gets tough?
As I mentioned before, science can be really challenging in Brazil, but there are things that are common to all of us, regardless of where we are. Every scientist has had to deal with paper rejections, extremely time-consuming grant applications that were not funded, years-old hypotheses that were not experimentally confirmed, good people leaving the lab, tons of bureaucracy to navigate, endless meetings, and so on. On the other hand, there are many rewards, such as that special result you’ve been waiting for, the brilliant thesis defense of someone from the lab, traveling to visit collaborators, and (occasionally) the acceptance of a special manuscript for publication or receiving an award. The negative experiences may have different origins, but all the positive aspects of science share one common element: young scientists. Students at any level and postdoctoral fellows are usually the ones who produce what a lab needs for all the good things I mentioned above. That is my main motivation: to keep young scientists enthusiastic about what they are doing. Science depends on these individuals more than anyone else, and it is our job to provide them with the right conditions and motivation to remain in the field.
What’s a common misconception about fungal infections that you’d like to debunk?
I have a colleague at the institute who constantly makes jokes about our work in mycology—he always writes to me saying he found some mouldy bread and asks what I can do to help. Other people, almost seriously, ask me if fungi can turn us into zombies after watching the series The Last of Us. Of course, all of this can be funny, but these questions reveal how much remains unknown about the real problem caused by fungal diseases. I think this is a challenge for all of us: to clarify for society that the importance of fungi goes far beyond clichés. These diseases literally kill millions of people every year, for which we have very few therapeutic agents, no licensed vaccines, and only a few accurate, low-cost diagnostic tests. As far as we know, the problem will only get bigger if nothing changes. Therefore, we need to make it clear to policymakers, health authorities, funding agencies, and society in general that we need more attention and funding for fungal diseases so that we can generate the right tools to keep this significant public health problem under control.
What advice would you give to young scientists interested in tackling antifungal resistance?
If you, as a young scientist, understand the importance of generating knowledge and tools to combat fungal diseases, join us, but know that there are many fronts to investigate. Today, it is extremely common to overvalue applied sciences and innovation models, which is great. However, we also need advances in basic sciences and the production of high-quality knowledge. Qualified knowledge leads to innovation, and innovative tools generate new questions that will drive the generation of new knowledge. There is no science that is more important—there is only good science. With this in mind, know that you will be joining a group of scientists with a common goal: to improve the lives of people, typically living in regions with serious socioeconomic restrictions, who are negatively affected by diseases caused by fungi. By joining us, mycologists, you will have the chance to contribute to a fascinating and vibrant field while also making improvements in human health.
If other researchers or those from industry wanted to collaborate with you or talk to you, how would they get in touch?
Just email me at marcio.rodrigues@fiocruz.br and I will be glad to chat!