{"id":35320,"date":"2026-09-04T12:54:42","date_gmt":"2026-09-04T16:54:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/?p=35320"},"modified":"2026-09-04T12:54:43","modified_gmt":"2026-09-04T16:54:43","slug":"top-tier-biology-journal-publishes-pvm-study-that-unlocks-secrets-of-a-drug-resistant-fungal-pathogen-which-causes-serious-infections-in-humans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/top-tier-biology-journal-publishes-pvm-study-that-unlocks-secrets-of-a-drug-resistant-fungal-pathogen-which-causes-serious-infections-in-humans.php","title":{"rendered":"Top tier biology journal publishes PVM study that unlocks secrets of a drug-resistant fungal pathogen, which causes serious infections in humans"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Though the name \u201cCandida auris<\/em>\u201d is far from a household term, public health experts know it well because the multi-drug-resistant fungal pathogen, which causes serious human infections, has been classified as an urgent threat by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Antibiotic Threats Report (2019). Dr. Shankar Thangamani<\/a>, Associate Professor of Microbiology and University Faculty Scholar in the Purdue University College of Veterinary Medicine\u2019s Department of Comparative Pathobiology, is researching C. auris<\/em>, aided by a 2.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Research findings, just published in Nature Microbiology<\/a>, show how C. auris<\/em> adapts and evades the immune system. This study is a collaborative work by two labs: the Thangamani team at Purdue and the Traven team from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. The study identified that C. auris<\/em> uses nutrient sensing to tune its virulence traits and modulate immune activation in changing environments. In a glucose-rich environment, such as in the blood, C. auris<\/em> suppresses its virulence traits and evades immune detection. Conversely, non-fermentable carbon sources prevalent in skin, such as lactic acid, activate adhesion and filamentation, thereby triggering macrophage responses. C. auris<\/em> dials up or down its potential for virulence and controls proportional immune responses. Metabolic flexibility enables C. auris<\/em> to optimize a critical trade-off: expressing virulence traits while minimizing immune recognition to colonize host tissues. These findings have significant implications in understanding how C. auris<\/em> adapts within the host environment, which could open the door to developing novel antifungal therapeutics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Previous work by the Thangamani team has also included two major studies published in PLOS Pathogens, a premier journal in host-pathogen interaction research. The researchers employed unbiased single-cell transcriptomics of murine skin infected with C. auris<\/em> to identify cell-type-specific immune responses, as reported in a study published in PLOS Pathogens<\/a> in 2024. In the subsequent study, Thangamani’s team found that, unlike\u00a0Candida albicans,<\/em>\u00a0a closely related fungal pathogen that induces protective IL-17-producing T cells,\u00a0C. auris\u00a0<\/em>predominantly induces IFN\u03b3-secreting pathogenic Th1 cells during reinfection. The surprising conclusion was that IFN\u03b3 enhances skin infection by\u00a0C. auris<\/em>\u00a0but not by\u00a0C. albicans<\/em>. These findings were also published in\u00a0PLOS Pathogens<\/a>\u00a0in 2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr. Thangamani said these results enhance the understanding of host defense and immune evasion mechanisms during C. auris<\/em> skin infection, which aids in understanding the pathogenesis of this emerging fungal pathogen and in developing novel antifungal therapeutics to prevent and treat C. auris<\/em> infections in humans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Though the name \u201cCandida auris\u201d is far from a household term, public health experts know it well because the multi-drug-resistant fungal pathogen, which causes serious human infections, has been classified as an urgent threat by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Antibiotic Threats Report (2019). Dr. Shankar Thangamani, Associate Professor of Microbiology and University Faculty Scholar in the Purdue University College of Veterinary Medicine\u2019s Department of Comparative Pathobiology, is researching C. auris, aided by a 2.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). New research findings, just published in Nature Microbiology, show how C. auris adapts and evades the immune system.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":35321,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,41,1054,29,11],"tags":[177,598,150],"class_list":["post-35320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academics","category-faculty-staff","category-graduate-student","category-our-people","category-research","tag-graduate-students","tag-our-people","tag-research"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35320"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35320\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35350,"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35320\/revisions\/35350"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}