Someone asked me a question after my talk on climate change and emerging fungal pathogens. The question was, why should we give attention to fungi when we know the risk of bioengineering it can be low. Hence the weight given to viruses and bacteria. I thought through and wondered that it is interesting and the EA community should understand why this should be considered. I think in my opinion we need to take fungi very seriously for so many reasons:
What we know that makes fungi pathogen interesting:
- There are only three known anitifungal drugs against major fungi pathogens which are not very effective. The available antifungals have narrow spectrus and high toxicity, and because of the plasticity of the fungi genome resistance is developed very easily. The seriousness of this issue was brought to fore during the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of secondary infections due to fungi pathogens were reported . The emergence of Azole resistance Aspergillus in Europe and environment is a concern as the mortality due to antibiotics resistance and limited drugs can get up to 100%.
- There are no vaccines for fungi. Currently, there are no immunotherapy or any vaccine available for any fungal infection. More research and funding is needed. Here is a nice paper that shows how close we are to finding a vaccine against any fungi pathogen.
- Candida auris the first fungi to have emerged as a result of climate change is a fungal pathogen. This is really interesting because this yeast behaves like bacteria and is naturally resistant to some antifungals. It is difficult to treat and led to the shutting down of hospitals . A Detroit hospital will stop taking patients temporarily as it tries to contain an outbreak of a rare, but potentially deadly and drug-resistant fungus. Find link to this new here. It was first discovered in 2009 and have now been reported in all the continents of the world. The CDC gives reasons why this pathogen is a problem
Why is Candida auris a problem? source
- It causes serious infections. C. auris can cause bloodstream infections and even death, particularly in hospital and nursing home patients with serious medical problems. More than 1 in 3 patients with invasive C. auris infection (for example, an infection that affects the blood, heart, or brain) die.
- It’s often resistant to medicines. Antifungal medicines commonly used to treat Candida infections often don’t work for Candida auris. Some C. auris infections have been resistant to all three types of antifungal medicines.
- It’s becoming more common. Although C. auris was just discovered in 2009, it has spread quickly and caused infections in more than a dozen countries.
- It’s difficult to identify. C. auris can be misidentified as other types of fungi unless specialized laboratory technology is used. This misidentification might lead to a patient getting the wrong treatment.
- It can spread in hospitals and nursing homes. C. auris has caused outbreaks in healthcare facilities and can spread through contact with affected patients and contaminated surfaces or equipment. Good hand hygiene and cleaning in healthcare facilities is important because C. auris can live on surfaces for several weeks
4. Fungi are the only species that have caused the complete extinction of a species. A newspaper reported thus "A deadly fungus that has driven more species to extinction than any other pathogen has spread across Africa unnoticed. Chytrid fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, or Bd for short, is a highly infectious fungus that affects frogs, toads, salamanders and other amphibians(Source). Although various diseases, such as white-nose syndrome resulting from the European fungus Pseudogymnoascus destructans, have inflicted harm upon animal populations, none have wrought the catastrophic consequences witnessed with Bd. This fungus is believed to be responsible for the decline of a minimum of 501 amphibian species worldwide and has contributed to the extinction of 90 species. Additionally, white-nose syndrome has claimed the lives of over 5.7 million bats throughout North America.
5. Fungi has a lot of Biosafety class 3 pathogens that are less studied without much antifungal therapy. Examples are Blastomyces dermatitidis, Coccidioides and Histoplasma capsulatum . All these are pathogenic to immune competent hosts.
What my lab is doing:
One question my lab is interested in is to know what are the species diversity of the fungi population in the African context and how are these species adapting to climate change. Are we likely to see a jump like we have seen with Candida auris?
This question is very tricky. It is a high-risk, high-yield project. For example, whereas Cryptococcus neoformans causes more infections in Sub-saharan Africa, most of the research is based outside Africa. In my lab we are trying to use metagenomic and one health approach to find out the population diversity of fungi pathogens and to attempt to answer the question, are we likely to see a new fungi that can threaten human lives?
We reported the first case of a plant pathogen that has jumped to humans "First report of neonatal sepsis due to Moesziomyces bullatus in a preterm low-birth-weight infant"
Conclusion
Anyone that succeeds in bio-engineering any fungi will do great damage to humanity. This is because research and funding in this area is minimal. The emergence of C. auris have proven that we can have a fungal species that acts like bacteria and threatens life. How this pathogen evolved is still a mystery. If you wish to talk more about this and to know what our lab is doing in Nigeria. I will be willing to talk more with anyone.
I'm interested to know how things are coming along with your lab?
I came to this same conclusion recently re: fungal threat as a seriously neglected risk in biosecurity -- fungal pathogens are hugely neglected in general and this is just magnified in biosec. I started writing a piece on it then paused, searched the forum for fungi, and your piece is sitting right there!
It would be interesting initiative to first (a) get "think fungal" onto the biosec mindset about pathogen types, to then (b) link biosec with global health efforts with respect to fungi given we're in the dark ages with our fungi detection/dx/rx capabilities (and even without AI, as you described One Health shows fungal risk is going to hugely increase) so advancing current priorities would in effect also help with preparedness & response capacities in a biosec context.
What made you convinced the threat is serious?
Some of the main reasons fungi aren't as central on our radar as bacteria and viruses is that at the human species level, they don't make that many of us sick - our warm bodies aren't optimal homes, our immune system can detect them and kick into gear faster than they reproduce at scale, they're not super efficient spreading between healthy humans.
Compared to an engineered virus, fungal threat isn't keeping me up at night. BUT...if I take a 'systems thinking' go at these protective factors, I notice potential for convergence that actually does make me quite nervous:
(a) situations that previously just lead to death such as many cancers, organ failures, or HIV/AIDs, are now survivable through chemo, invasive surgeries, immuno-suppressant drugs -- this success also means a rapidly growing number of us globally are immunocompromised therefore more susceptible to fungal infection
(b) climate change is affecting fungal adaptation to warmer environments which extends their viable enviro range into places they haven't traditionally been present (> animal/human encounters). It could potentially inch them closer to mammalian body temps, but that's still speculative.
(c) this is me wandering a bit but seems worth mentioning -- manipulating infectious fungi already happens in secure lab conditions, but new methods to speed up and scale fungi in areas like alt protein & fermentation food science are more open...this is potentially dual purpose in lowering the barriers to manipulating fungi.
So more and more people are vulnerable to fungal infection as it is, more fungi may evolve to a point they can infect mammals incl. humans, and fungal reproduction acceleration techniques are already in use.
Then we consider our abilities to detect, diagnose, and treat fungal pathogens...surveillance and therapeutics are decades behind where we are for viruses and bacteria. Resistance is already a problem.
Business as usual means we'll see this problem steadily growing. But should a sufficiently evolved or engineered fungus emerge on the scene, the existing state of neglect could stand as a major vulnerability to our ability to prevent or contain spread before significant harm & suffering is caused.
The growing threat of fungal pathogens to global agriculture represents one of the most underappreciated risks to food resilience in the 21st century. Recent studies warn that fungal diseases already destroy between 10–23% of global crops annually, with additional post-harvest losses of up to 20%, and climate change is accelerating the spread of these pathogens into new geographic regions. (ScienceDaily) In the era of artificial intelligence and climate instability, safeguarding food systems must therefore extend beyond yield optimization to include fungal biosecurity surveillance, predictive pathogen modeling, and rapid-response agricultural defense systems. AI-driven analytics, satellite monitoring, genomic surveillance, and machine learning could become essential tools for forecasting outbreaks and identifying emerging fungal threats before they devastate staple crops. (arXiv) The recent case involving the alleged smuggling of Fusarium graminearum into the United States further illustrates the biosecurity dimension of fungal pathogens. This fungus, which causes Fusarium head blight in wheat, barley, maize, and rice, has been described in scientific and security literature as a potential agro-terrorism agent because of its capacity to trigger massive economic losses and contaminate food supplies with dangerous mycotoxins. (ABC News) As nations seek to build resilient food systems under climate stress, one plausible and urgent priority is strengthening research, governance, and international policy frameworks around fungi with agro-terrorism potential. This includes expanding fungal genomics research, establishing transnational pathogen-monitoring systems, improving biosurveillance regulations, and integrating AI-enabled early-warning systems into agricultural security strategies.