Fungal infections rarely grab headlines like viral outbreaks or antibiotic-resistant “superbugs”. Yet for Emeritus Professor Marilyn Anderson, Office of Life Sciences at La Trobe University, they represent one of today’s most urgent and underestimated health challenges.
“People are largely focused on antibiotics and the need for new antibiotics for bacterial infections,” Anderson explains. “But there are fewer classes of drugs available for fungal diseases, and fungi are becoming resistant to the drugs currently used in the clinic.”
The overuse of antifungal chemicals in agriculture has accelerated the problem.
“Farmers have been using antifungal agents prophylactically, even before there’s disease,” she says. “There’s a lot of it sprayed around on crops like corn and rice, and now people are coming to the clinic with fungal infections that are resistant to virtually all the known treatments.”
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now lists several fungal pathogens as top priorities, including species causing life-threatening infections in immunocompromised patients. While some fungal diseases strike people already unwell, others are surprisingly widespread.
“One in 10 people on Earth probably have fungally infected toenails,” Anderson says. “It can be painful, it’s unsightly, and people often don’t realise it’s an infectious disease – but it’s also a very big market if you’re trying to develop a drug.”
From plant “safe sex” to a new class of antifungal drugs
Anderson’s path into antifungal discovery began in an unexpected place: studying plant reproduction. Early in her career, she investigated how flowering plants avoid self-pollination to encourage genetic diversity – a natural barrier known as self-incompatibility.
“I noticed that bacteria and fungi just didn’t grow on the female reproductive tissue,” she recalls. “It evolved to be sweet and sticky to nurture pollen, but it didn’t allow the growth of disease organisms. That started a study of the natural protective mechanism in the flower.”
Students joked the research was about “safe sex in plants”, but the implications were profound.
Those same protective molecules – plant defensins – have since proven highly effective at killing human fungal pathogens. “These antifungal molecules evolved with flowering plants over 400 million years and are really effective against fungal disease in humans,” she says.
That breakthrough led to Hexima, a spin-out company Anderson helped establish in 1998. Based at La Trobe for more than two decades, Hexima advanced a new class of antifungal drugs known as “deftides”, named by the World Health Organization. The lead candidate, Pezadeftide, showed promise as a topical treatment for fungal nail disease, progressing through successful Phase 1 trials before the pandemic disrupted Phase 2.
With Hexima shifting focus, Anderson co-founded Deftbiotech to continue the antifungal mission. “We’ve set up this new company to take the technology forward and hopefully run another clinical trial under better conditions,” she says. “We’re raising money at the moment to run this second trial.”
Though currently small – “there are only two of us based at La Trobe at this stage,” she notes – Deftbiotech is fuelled by Anderson’s enduring scientific curiosity and belief in nature’s ingenuity.
“For me, the most rewarding part is the basic science, understanding the biology and how exquisite evolution is.”
La Trobe’s role and what comes next
La Trobe has been a constant partner. “Both companies have been embedded at La Trobe,” Anderson says.
“Hexima grew to about 30 employees on campus. The advantage was access to all the equipment and facilities, and La Trobe had access to our people for teaching and supervising students.”
The University’s commercialisation support has strengthened too. “La Trobe’s office has been very helpful in directing us to potential sources of money, helping introduce us to people, and guiding us along the way,” she says.
Anderson’s priority now is to progress Pezadeftide through its next clinical trial, then look at where the drug could help with other topical fungal infections.
As a speaker at La Trobe's recent Industry Innovation Series event, Frontiers in Infectious Diseases Innovation, Professor Marilyn sparked both scientific and commercial interest.
“We want to help others on similar journeys understand some of the things we’ve had to deal with on the way to commercialisation,” she says. “And we hope to attract interest from potential investors or companies that may be interested in developing an antifungal drug.”
Connect with Marilyn
La Trobe Profile
E: M.Anderson@latrobe.edu.au
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