Cunningham Lab
Principal Investigator: Kyle W Cunningham
Institution: Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, MD)
Primary Subfield: Immunology
Recruitment Status: ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
Fungal infections are an enormous concern to human health and the global burdens continues to grow. Resistance to two major classes of antifungals (azoles, echinocandins) has emerged in the most common fungal pathogens, such as Candida albicans. Resistance to a third major class of antifungals (polyenes) is less common but has contributed already to multidrug- and pan-resistance observed in many isolates of Candida auris and Candida glabrata. New antifungals are urgently needed. Additionally, a better understanding of innate and acquired resistance mechanisms may lead to new strategies that reverse resistance to current antifungals and prevent its emergence. This project advances all these goals in C. glabrata by implementing a powerful new technology of functional genomics called Tn-seq. Tn-seq (saturating transposon mutagenesis coupled with next-generation DNA sequencing) mutates and barcodes every gene in the fungal pathogen for easy quantitative profiling. Using Tn-seq in C. glabrata, this project will identify all the genes that alter resistance to all three approved polyenes (amphotericin B, nystatin, natamycin) as well as three next-generation polyenes (AM-2-19, BSG005, luce…
Active NIH Awards
- 1R21AI202023-01: Mechanisms of Polyene Resistance in Candida glabrata (2026)
- 1R21AI199117-01: Echinocandin Cross-resistance and Hetero-resistance (2026)
- 1R21AI196880-01A1: Exploration of Aerolysin-like Toxins in Candida (2026)
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