Fungal Infections an Unintended Consequence of Advanced Immunotherapy Research Shows

What You Need To Know

• Jigar Desai, Ph.D., assistant professor of medical sciences at the Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine and scientist at the Hackensack Meridian Center for Discovery and Innovation (CDI) and a team of scientists have identified the specific mechanistic cause of life-threatening infections as a result of a complication of certain immunotherapies and small molecule kinase inhibitors.
• As major fungal infections have become more common across the globe, these complications are an unexpected phenomenon.
• He shares the findings in a paper featured in the journal Cell on May 22: “C5a-licensed phagocytes drive sterilizing immunity during systemic fungal infection.”

“These findings may help doctors and scientists alike better understand how some of these cases arise - and how to avoid them,” said Dr. Desai, a fungal expert and first author of the paper. Desai and his team, which includes colleagues from the National Institutes of Health, Duke University, and Mount Sinai, established that the C5a protein, the penultimate effector constituent of the complement pathway, is key to the body's innate ability to fight systemic fungal infections. The team also identified enhanced complement pathway signature acts as a predictive biomarker for systemic candidiasis. With the use of animal models, patient data and sera, the team showed how C5a and its downstream effects are crucial for the body’s immune cells, specifically neutrophils and macrophages, to clear the fungus Candida albicans, when it has overtaken the body’s natural defenses. The team showed this in stages, both in animal models and in patient serum, by isolating what roles the C5 plays. In addition to uncovering induced complement signature as a potential biomarker for systemic candidiasis, this work will be highly impactful in the clinical setting, where complement C5-targeted therapeutics, such as the anti-C5 monoclonal antibodies eculizumab/ravulizumab (as well as the C5a receptor inhibitor, avacopan) are the treatment of choice. In these settings, findings from this work emphasizes the importance of vigilant surveillance for opportunistic fungal infections, where early diagnosis can improve patient outcomes.

"Our findings establish a new paradigm in immunobiology, demonstrating for the first time the direct critical role of cell-intrinsic complement generation for effective host defense against Candida. The multifaceted translation of our work shows promise for the development of individualized risk stratification and prognostication strategies in patients at-risk for invasive fungal disease." - Dr. Desai