Dr Johannes Rack awarded prestigious MRC Career Development Award

Dr Johannes Rack has won a prestigious MRC Career Development Award with MRC CMM entitled “Control of genomic integrity and virulence of Aspergillus fumigatus by ADP-ribosylation.” We look forward to welcoming him to the Centre in Spring 2023. Since 2014 Johannes has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at the University of Oxford where he developed an interest in adaptive processes, in particular ADP-ribosylation, which are used to overcome cellular stresses. He has already made important contributions to our understanding of this process, including the discovery of new ADP-ribosylation chemistry and the first evidence that microbes use ADP-ribosylation signalling to overcome host defences.

His fellowship will investigate how the fungal pathogen Aspergillus fumigatus overcomes host defences to cause disease. The threat of life-threatening fungal infections is rising with the increase in the vulnerable patient population and the appearance of drug resistant Aspergillus fumigatus variants. To overcome this problem and develop new treatment strategies, we must understand how Aspergillus can survive in a patient's body. The human immune system combats fungal infections partly by damaging the DNA of the invasive pathogen, thus severely restricting the microbe's ability to survive within the body. Therefore, disease-causing microbes have developed a sophisticated DNA repair machinery to survive in their hosts. In fungal pathogens, this process is severely understudied, which limits not only our understanding of Aspergillus host adaptation, but also our ability to manipulate this process for therapeutic gain. Johannes’ work focuses on the cellular signal ADP-ribosylation, which marks locations of DNA damage and coordinates the Aspergillus DNA damage response. By studying this signal, his work will provide invaluable insights into how Aspergillus defends itself against the host, potentially enabling us to design new therapies to treat drug-resistant fungi. This is an area of research that is becoming increasingly pertinent as antifungal resistance is now the primary cause for therapeutic failure in Aspergillosis treatment.