Dr. Ted White has been working for the last 40 years to understand the mechanisms of drug resistance in pathogenic fungi such as Candida albicans, Cryptococcus neoformans, and Aspergillus fumigatus. He was the first to characterize point mutations in the target enzyme and overexpression of efflux pumps as mechanisms associated with azole drug resistance. He described loss of allelic variation as a mechanism by which mutation in one gene allele is transferred to both alleles. He has extensively characterized a series of 17 clinical isolates from one patient that has provided a wide range of observations on how resistance develops and manifests clinically in a patient.
As the general mechanisms of resistance were defined, he then went on to characterize the transcriptional regulation of these mechanisms. He identified and characterized the transcription factor that regulates the target gene and other genes in the sterol biosynthesis pathway.
Recently, he has shown definitively that azole drugs enter the cell via facilitated diffusion rather than passive transport, contrary to widely held beliefs. He and his collaborators also sequenced the genomes of several fungi that cause athlete’s foot, and studied the interaction of those fungi with the host and the immune system. These observations have tremendous implications for drug development of azoles and other antifungal compounds.
Current work in the White laboratory is focused on the drug resistant mechanisms in the newly-described pathogenic fungus, Candida auris. In addition, Dr. White is working with collaborators at Kansas State University to analyzed the mycobiome (fungal species) in a dog’s mouth that has implications for therapy of a variety of canine diseases.
Dr. White is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, an honorary association of the American Microbiology Society. Dr. White’s publications repeatedly move the field of drug response and drug resistance in pathogenic fungi into new and exciting fields.