Fungi such as Aspergillus are so common in our surroundings that we breathe in hundreds to thousands of spores every day. In healthy people, fungi typically pose no threat, but they can cause deadly infections in those with compromised immune systems. However, it is increasingly recognized that viral infections such as influenza or SARS-CoV-2 can increase the risk of invasive Aspergillus infections even in healthy people.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has stated that invasive fungal infections are an increasing threat to human health and has reiterated that more research is needed. Until now little was known about how the Aspergillus fungus was able to take root, and what could be done to get rid of it. Researchers at the University of Calgary working with researchers at McGill University have provided new insight on why the immune system fails.

“We discovered that influenza and COVID-19 destroy a previously unknown natural immunity that we need to resist invasive fungal infections,” says Nicole Sarden, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Calgary and first author on the study.

New tools are steadily bridging this gap. And ongoing development of one particular technique, cryo-electron tomography, or cryo-ET, has the potential to deepen how researchers study and understand how cells function in health and disease.

As the former editor-in-chief of Science magazine and as a researcher who has studied hard-to-visualize large protein structures for decades, I have witnessed astounding progress in the development of tools that can determine biological structures in detail. Just as it becomes easier to understand how complicated systems work when you know what they look like, understanding how biological structures fit together in a cell is key to understanding how organisms function.

Newspaper headlines from the U.S. to the U.K. and most places in between highlight the surge in sick patients suffering from respiratory viruses. The so-called “tripledemic” of lung infections including respiratory synclinal virus (RSV), influenza (flu) and COVID-19 (coronavirus) is likely to last throughout the winter season. This explosion of infections requires more treatment options to support overloaded hospitals and overworked medics as they restore people’s health.

It has been known for a long time that intubation of an infant with any lung condition, or even an adult with severe COVID-19 using either ventilation or extra-corporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), comes with risks and side effects that could cause permanent damage not limited to the lungs. However, hypoxia, which means oxygen deficiency, is a medical emergency that is a common complication of severe lung infections. If not treated, it can lead to severe disability and even death.

UNIGE researchers have discovered that a medication commonly used to treat herpes can combat an antibiotic-resistant bacterium by disrupting its defense mechanisms.

Antibiotic resistance, or the ability of bacteria to develop resistance to treatment with antibiotics, has become a major concern for global health. The World Health Organization (WHO) considers it one of the greatest threats to health. The overuse of antibiotics has contributed to the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which can cause serious illness and death. One example of an antibiotic-resistant pathogen is Klebsiella pneumoniae, a bacterium commonly found in hospitals and known for its virulence. Without effective treatment options, we could see a resurgence of diseases such as pneumonia and salmonella, which were once easily treated with antibiotics.

Researchers at the University of Geneva (UNIGE) have found that edoxudine, an anti-herpes molecule developed in the 1960s, can disrupt the protective surface of Klebsiella bacteria and make them more vulnerable to being eliminated by immune cells. The researchers’ findings were recently published in the journal PLOS ONE.