UT Health Sciences News: A Researcher’s Six-Year Chase to Understand How a Deadly Mold Survives Inside Human Lungs

Every day, we breathe in spores of Aspergillus fumigatus without a second thought. The mold is everywhere - in soil, in compost, in the air of nearly every room we enter.

For most people, the immune system clears it out before it ever becomes a problem. But for someone with a weakened immune system, those same spores can settle into the lung, wake up and begin to grow. Once that happens, the odds turn grim. Mortality rates for the resulting infection, invasive aspergillosis, can run as high as 90%.

Jarrod Fortwendel, PhD, has spent his career trying to understand what happens in that narrow window between a spore drifting into the lung and a full-blown, tissue-invading infection.

A new five-year, $3.22 million R01 grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases will let him and his team at the University of Tennessee Health Sciences College of Pharmacy dig deeper into a question that sounds almost simple: what is this organism eating, and can we stop it?

Read more on the UT Health Sciences News website.