Removing Barriers to Fungal Bioimaging for the Global Medical Mycology Community (360G-Wellcome-337892_Z_25_Z)

Human fungal pathogens cause 2.5 million deaths each year, primarily in low and middle income (LMIC) countries. The WHO identified 20 Priority Fungal Pathogens requiring urgent fundamental research. Advanced bioimaging is crucial to achieving this agenda by enabling dynamic, live, quantitative, single-cell analysis in infection contexts. Yet molecular, technological, analytical and expertise barriers, coupled with challenges inherent to the study of fungal pathogens, prevent the global medical mycology community from applying 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) Bespoke, affordable, single cell imaging chambers; 2) A Pan-fungal molecular bioimaging toolbox; and 3) Robust high-throughput image analysis pipelines, underpinned by advanced training courses and research exchange. Our foundation phase delivered stakeholder consolidation and proof-of-principle development in three emerging fungal pathogens. The scale-up phase will broaden access to advanced bioimaging tools across fungal pathogens and build fungal bioimaging expertise in Africa. Addressing these barriers simultaneously and ensuring uptake by the global medical mycology community will propel fungal pathogen research to the forefront of modern bioimaging, enabling insight into basic biology and antifungal resistance mechanisms.