Micah McClain
Duke University, NC·Medicine & Clinical Research
Invasive candidiasis is a bloodstream or deep-tissue infection by Candida yeasts. It is often deadly; in solid organ transplant patients, up to 40% of these infections end in death.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Microbiology & Immunology
Genetics
- Topics
invasive candidiasis
candidemia
Candida
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jan 2028
What they work on
- Track how the blood immune response changes over the course of invasive candidiasis, using bulk RNA-sequencing of serial whole-blood samples from three existing patient biobanks.
- Link host gene-expression patterns, including the lab's candidemia diagnostic signature, to time to recovery, disease progression and death to find prognostic biomarkers.
- Identify gene-expression markers that reflect response to antifungal treatment, as a basis for future PCR-based blood tests that guide therapy length.
More about the research
Doctors need to know quickly which patients need aggressive treatment or surgery and which can safely stop antifungal drugs sooner. Stopping sooner lowers the risk of side effects, drug interactions with transplant medicines, and drug resistance. Current tests look for the fungus itself. They are slow, miss many cases, and say little about whether treatment is working. This project instead reads the patient's own immune response in the blood.
Why it matters
For transplant recipients and other high-risk patients with invasive candidiasis, blood-based immune signatures could support fast, noninvasive PCR tests. Such tests could predict who will respond to antifungal drugs and guide how long to treat. This may allow earlier, better-targeted therapy and less unnecessary use of potentially harmful antifungal medicines.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Karen Norris
University of Georgia, GA·Microbiology & Immunology
Test whether the NXT-2 vaccine, a lab-made peptide based on a fungal protein shared across species, triggers strong immune responses in nonhuman primates.
Vincent Michael Bruno
University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD·Microbiology & Immunology
Determine the role of ANGPTL4, a protein produced downstream of the host hypoxia-response pathway, in Mucorales lung invasion, and test whether blocking it treats mucormycosis in mice.
Shankar Thangamani
Purdue University, IN·Microbiology & Immunology
Determine how resident skin bacteria and other skin microbiota directly inhibit the growth and skin colonization of Candida auris, a drug-resistant yeast that spreads between hospitalized patients.
The school
Duke University: 61 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 417 research doctorates a year.
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