Birmingham researchers to lead ambitious £5.7 million project into the deadliest form of invasive fungal disease.
Fungal brain infections are the deadliest form of invasive fungal disease.
Professor Rebecca Drummond, from the University of Birmingham’s School of Infection, Inflammation and Immunology, will lead an international collaboration looking at unravelling the pathways of human invasive fungal diseases. The multimillion-pound programme has been awarded funding through the Novo Nordisk Foundation’s Challenge Programme and is one of nine new programme grants supporting major scientific challenge areas.
The Novo Nordisk Foundation Challenges are intended to enable research teams to pursue questions that require long-term collaboration, scientific depth and expertise across disciplines and institutions. Each of the 2026 awards, announced earlier this month, will unite strong research groups and diverse expertise across Europe.
Through the “Unlocking the mechanisms of brain-specific anti-fungal immunity: UMBRA” project, Professor Drummond will bring together a team of immunologists, neuroscientists and clinical mycologists from the UK, Denmark and Uganda to better understand how fungi invade the central nervous system. Collaborating institutions include Danmarks Tekniske Universitet and Københavns Universitet in Demark and Makerere University in Uganda.
“This exciting award will allow us to set up an international consortium that is multi-disciplinary and particularly helps establish better connections between discovery scientists and clinicians,” explains Drummond, Professor of Fungal Immunology at University of Birmingham.
The specific challenge of this theme is to understand the mechanisms of human invasive fungal infections such as virulence factors, host-pathogen interactions and antifungal resistance, with the aim of enabling the development of better diagnostics and treatments for fungal disease.
Fungal brain infections are the deadliest form of invasive fungal disease. Yet, to date it has not been clear how fungi invade the central nervous system (CNS) and CNS-localised antifungal immune responses remain poorly understood. The project will focus on fungus Cryptococcus neoformans, the leading cause of fungal meningitis in humans. Named by WHO as a critical priority pathogen, C. neoformans is responsible for ~100,000 deaths each year and has a mortality rate reaching up to 70%, partly driven by complications such as high intracranial pressure.
Whilst there have been improvements in antifungal drug therapy for fungal meningitis, there is still room to explore the role of immune suppression and neuroinflammation. The research team hope that the programme will build a foundation for future immune-based therapies for fungal infections .
“Better diagnostics, disease models and treatment strategies depend on a deeper understanding of the biological mechanisms underlying disease. The projects funded through the 2026 Challenge Programme in this area bring together highly specialised expertise across countries and fields to address complementary and high-priority gaps. This is likely to generate widely applicable insights that can accelerate progress across Europe as well as globally,” says Flemming Konradsen, Chief Scientific Officer, Health, Novo Nordisk Foundation.
Professor of Fungal Immunology
Rebecca Drummond is a fungal immunologist researching mechanisms of immunity that protect us from fungal pathogens, such as Candida albicans and Cryptococcus neoformans.
