IMB Friday Seminar Series: Battle to the end: how fungal pathogens manipulate and evade innate immunity

Event Details

Date:

Friday, 21 June 2019 - Friday, 21 June 2019

Time:

12:00 pm - 1:00 pm

Room:

IMB Auditorium Level 2 (2.171) Building 80

UQ Location:

Queensland Bioscience Precinct (St Lucia)

URL:

http://events.imb.uq.edu.au/

Event category(s):

Full Description:: Speaker: Associate Professor Ana Traven,
Biomedicine Discovery Institute at Monash University

Fungal pathogens cause millions of human infections every year, ranging from skin and nail infections to invasive diseases that kill more than 1.5 million people per year. Antifungal treatment options are very limited, and antimicrobial drug resistance (AMR) is a problem, including the recent emergence of the fungal superbug Candida auris. A/Prof Traven's research is focused on Candida albicans, a yeast that is usually a benign coloniser of humans, but which is also a common human fungal pathogen that causes mucosal and also systemic infections with very poor outcomes. Innate immune phagocytes defend against Candida, but Candida mounts a counter-attack through sophisticated pathways that involve a developmental switch and metabolic competition. We want to understand who wins in this interaction (Candida or immune cells?), when and why, with the view to finding ways to manipulate the system to help the host at the expense of the pathogen. To answer these questions, A/Prof Traven is combining fungal genetics and cell biology, live cell imaging of infected immune cells, 'omics' approaches and animal models of infection.