New hope for treatment of fungal infection for cancer & AIDS patients in ICUs

Team L&M

Scientists have identified a new gene that can hold the key to prevent fungal infection Candidiasis that often affects intensive-care unit (ICU) patients, cancer patients and patients receiving immunosuppressive therapy.

The gene called CSA6 has been identified in Candida albicans a fungal species infamous for causing high rates of morbidity and mortality under certain immuno-compromised conditions such as AIDS or during cancer treatment. This fungal species resides in mucosal linings of the gastrointestinal and urogenital tract of healthy individuals, but turns into a pathogen under immuno-compromised conditions breaching the host defense causing superficial as well as life-threatening systemic infection.

The result came out of a recent collaborative study between Professor Kaustuv Sanyal’s group at Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), Bangalore, India and Christophe d’Enfert’s group at Institut Pasteur, Paris, France (Jaitly et al, 2022). The teams carried out a large-scale screen to identify regulators of chromosome stability in C. albicans, a clinically relevant fungal model system. JNCASR is an autonomous institute of Department of Science and Technology (DST).

The study has been published in the journal Nature Communications, and represents the first-ever report of such an extensive screen in the human fungal pathogen C. albicans.