[Music]
hello and welcome to technically speaking where scientists and Engineers come together to chat about a common interest share knowledge and satisfy some curiosity I'm Ellie and I'm joined by Laura to talk about fungus and how it relates to medicine Laura you brought this to my attention how did this come across your very intelligent mind thank you I around about Christmas time I was just kind of browsing through socials and email newsletters and things kept coming up about fungus that made me
think what how is this such a big thing in medicine that people don't know a lot about so it's got me interested and I tend to think of fungus as being mushrooms that I eat and things that grow in the woods so I thought I have to know more about the medical side of it now I admit I had no idea there was a medical side to fungus until you brought this topic up but I am intrigued and curious as ever and like you said I was very much in the mushrooms growing in
the forest Camp of fungus but I've done a little bit of research and it turns out that all mushrooms are fungus but not all fungus are mushrooms yeah I think um when I was reading into it I thought yeast I not have thought of yeast as a fungus I use that all the time I bake sourdough every week yeah fungus is a very broad group of things including the funguses the mushrooms the yeasts the slime molds which if you've never Googled slime molds I highly recommend because they are really funky
no I hope that's not a thing in medicine though that doesn't sound Pleasant I I imagine not I mean maybe we'll Discover it soon but uh as far as I understand slime molds and Medicine are not currently a Hot Topic good yes mushrooms have a stalk and a fun cap like very much the like emoji of a mushroom whereas fungus can look completely different and look very strange and also be microscopic which is quite fun ah which then I guess feeds into like infections in the human body yeah
absolutely yeah cuz I also I have a face cream that includes some sort of acid that is produced by yeast that live naturally on your skin so I obviously I'm aware that there is fungus associated with the human body albe it not mushroomy fungus not tasty fungus yeah but I hadn't really considered much else I guess blue cheese as well I should mention that because I really like blue cheese so I like fungus y things to eat yeah that's a mold I think blue cheese is is a mold which is a fungus but is
also its own like subdivision yes yeah I think most people think of like yeast infections in a negative way as well like fungus causing um things like fungal nail infections athletes F all that sort of thing so yeah fungus and the human body probably has a lot more to it than we imagined yeah and I guess that ties into one of the big news stories that I saw big I thought it was big anyway um which was about redesigning an antifungal drug because apparently it's really toxic to people
it just happens to be yeah slightly more toxic to the fungus and they looked at the mechanism of how it acts on the fungus and on the human body and then modified its structure so it was less toxic to humans but still had some effect on the fungus and I thought oh that's cool that is cool I appreciate that it's like side effects right so you're getting rid of the fungal infection but you also feel really rubbish but I guess they've improved it so that you don't feel quite so bad so
the drug or the molecule is called ano teresin B and it has a short-term effect of flu like symptoms but then longterm it's hesy toxic to the kidneys oh so what it does it forms this porous medium that extracts the cholesterol from the kidneys and just stops them from functioning that sounds horrible exactly but then it also sounds like some fungal infections are incredibly terrible and kill about I think it's one and a half million people worldwide annually wow
that's surprisingly High I didn't think it was that high either so it's either definitely be killed by the fungus it sounds like or maybe be killed by the treatment I mean neither of those sound like great options I'm surprised fungus is so high because I feel like we always hear about viruses we always hear about bacterial infections but we never hear about oh this person's got a really serious fungal infection no again you tend to think of things like athletes
foot which people aren't too bothered about but it sounds like they tend to infect people who have already immun compromised in some way they're already not well because they're I don't know having cancer treatment or something or recovering from major surgery and then the immune system is not so so hot at that time exactly yeah so if you inhale some I guess spores or something from the Fungus there you go well that's another um 202 for bingo card horrible
fungal infection but they've improved it so at least it's a little bit of a positive spin one of the reasons it's not improved so much it's because in comparison to other things like viruses and bacteria it doesn't affect as many people in as terrible a way so it although it kills a lot of people it's still pretty Niche I mean to be fair 1 and a half million annually probably isn't that high compared to like all the big hitters that we hear about more often it's still bad but guess it could
be more deadly I'm not sure what I'm advocating for here more awareness of more better fungal treatment you get two women that are tired to talk about bacterial and fungal infections and it takes a barely to still be this was on um the journal Nature it was on their podcast a few months ago and they were saying there's still more work to do they've tested it on human cells in add dish in the lab and they've also done some tests in rodents in the lab but they need to look at the longer
term effects and the more widespread effects obviously just some cells in the lab they'll behave in one way but the human body is way more complicated and could behave in other ways absolutely so it's not going to be coming to Market anytime soon doesn't sound like it but it does sound very helpful so they understand the mechanism better for a start and then they know that what it does to the fungus is it extracts a molecule that's similar to the um the cholesterol that's in the kidneys ah ero
sterile I think it is so it extracts that from the fungus's membrane and the membrane just kind of can't function anymore just falls apart so similar mechanism to how viruses can be killed that does sound positive that the more they know the better treatments they can make and the more they can then understand about different properties that could help yeah I feel good about this in general yeah and I think that's one of the things that got to me so much is that they've known about this drug
for a while and they know how terrible it is but they had to go to this level of detail to look at exactly how these mechanisms work and exactly how the structure of the molecules affects what's coming out of the biological samples to figure out what's going on and I think that's the way science is going isn't it it requires that incredible level of detail to figure out well what next how can we improve this really drilling down so moving on then to cancer and fungus which I also didn't
realize was a thing you'll find out everyone that this is quite a mind-blowing episode to me but I also didn't realize that lots of other people didn't know which made me feel slightly better so we only discovered this in 2019 that there are fungus funguses fungus cells fungus SI inside cancers which I think is absolutely bizarre this the other thing that popped up on my social media around about Christmas time it was something on Twitter like a oneliner if we found this new thing in
more detail and I thought what there again there is fungus living in cancers I did not know this more people should know this more people should know this how did they find this out were they looking did they just were treating Cancers and you know they do biopsies and remove tumors and all sorts and then looked closer and were like holy moly there's some fungi in here I found that research paper from 2019 and I don't think they were actually the first research group to observe this they just
set their study up in a different way to others so there are a few research papers from earlier on that were like um we've analyzed DNA from breast cancer say and we found all these markers for a microbiome so not just bacteria or viruses but we found fungus in there as well or markers for fungus I should say right but then this 2019 study was looking at pancreatic cancer and there's obviously fungus living in your gut quite happily some of it's meant to be there it's good for you which I also
didn't know this is going to just be me on repeat like a broken record I didn't know this I didn't know this yeah but apparently to scientists in that field it's quite well known and they're not too surprised by it okay there's fungus living in my in my guts that's fine I'm making my peace with that but so what they were wondering is can the fungus also get into the pancreas and what effect does that have on cancer so this was a study that they did using mice I
think in very controlled environments so they would give them antifungal drugs it's the same example terce and be which I just talked about so I was wondering what the effect on the mice was if it damages your kidneys yeah I assume they wiped out all the um the fungus that were living in the mice and then carefully reintroduced a certain type of fungus to see whether different fungi had different effects right and I think that one got a lot of interest because
they were also saying the fungus seemed to cause cancer which has since been disproven in that particular type of cancer yeah as I say there were a few studies beforehand they said yeah we found markers for fungi in these different cancers we don't really know how they got there is it wor like if you've got breast cancer obviously that's terrible in the first place but if you've got breast cancer and fungus in your breast cancer tumors is that like more dangerous more
aggressive or do we not know yet there is still research ongoing to figure out exactly what so there were things like they tended to observe it more in people over 50 I think okay that's interesting there have been so many studies on different types it was a study was a a year or two ago that looked at 35 different types of cancer they collected over 17,00 samples from patients and analyze them to see what fungus is associated with what sort of cancer and are there any other different groupings
like age whether you smoke um how you respond to various therapeutic treatments it sounds really really complicated yeah so I didn't look at all the different types because I think that would have made my brain male oh that would have taken ages the big thing is they don't really know exactly how it gets there and they don't know necessarily whether it always has a good effect or always has a B effect it depends but I think the key point is now that they know this they
can look at it in more detail and consider fun guy as part of how you would treat the cancer yeah I was going to say because you were saying about those improved antifungal drugs if you're also then having chemotherapy and all the rest of it can you whack some antifungals into the mix to help you know shrink your tumor or make you have improved outcomes it sounds like it it's already a thing for bacteria apparently again I didn't know this but they do sometimes give antibacterial agents to
people with certain cancers because they know that the bacteria tend to locate in the tumor and have potentially protective effects to the tumor I mean I get it in terms of like a fungus would or a bacteria would go to a tumor because they like often have a lot of high blood flow and they're taking a lot of resources from the body if it was like almost parasitic in a way that it would be mining nutrients from the tumor itself that was the impression I got as
I said they don't entirely know how they get there's an idea that the fungus is transported through the bloodstream and then obviously it gets to a place it must like so it hangs out there and it's kind of protected there so the body's immune system can't get to it which it normally would I suppose yeah that's also true because a tumor is obviously then sort of outside the body's immune system like it's still growing sort of thing and the person is getting iller
and then if they're traveling in the bloodstream they would end up there and then they are protected from the immune system and they've got access to all the blood flow and the nutrients so yeah that does make sense yeah there's still this idea that I guess this is why it's currently being researched cuz this is a really new idea that the fungus helps promote cancer growth but then it has to get there to begin with and I don't know start some sort of colony I don't know
if that really is likely or if it is more what we're thinking whether there the tumor first and the fungus say oh this is a quite a nice place to hang out yeah I I'm really intrigued how the two would be interl unless the fungus that you had anyway was then damaging your cells in some way which would then lead potentially to a cancer but I don't know how that would work I wouldn't know enough about how they would intera no I mean there's an example from cervical cancer in women there's a virus
isn't it that's what they look for when they do that test on you they're looking for the virus for HPV yeah that can cause I think it's a change in the genes of the cells in your cervix yeah I believe so so if viruses can promote cancer then could the fungus but again I think it should point out this seems like it's quite a rare thing yes and there's still a lot of research ongoing so this is just a like crazy specul yes we're not doctors well Laura is but not a medical doctor yeah don't take
medical advice from someone with a PhD in computational chemistry so I find it mind-blowing as well that we have fungus in the gut and in our bodies anyway which I know I shouldn't because I've done actually quite a lot of research this year into the microbiome and the fact that we have all these sort of bacterias and everything living in our bodies all the time and it can really affect your health but I never considered fungus as part of that sort of Flora of things
that are living in your intestines no do you think that's cuz going back to what we were saying up top it's because we tend to think of fungus is just the mushrooms that you get in the garden I think it must be like fungus and Medicine are two words that I have not previously considered before in any context despite like obviously knowing things like athletes foot and stuff and like fungal nail infections is like a you know a general thing that's in the world I read as well that it's a lot
smaller so you have like thousands of species of bacteria and stuff living in you but but there's way less of a percentage of that that is fungus so maybe that's why it's not so well studied or popular knowledge in the same way it might be worth maybe this is a future episode but looking at the differences between bacteria and fungi to understand why the bacteria may be more common place in the human body yeah I still think of fungus as too much like a plant so I'm like astonished that it
can survive like you say it's like surviving in cancer cells and stuff but I'm like there's no sunlight like how is it doing this but obviously it's completely different mechanism and also I don't think of fungus as Tiny I don't think of microscopic fungus I think of like mushrooms that you buy from SSB maybe there needs to be more of a rather than just showing that mushroom Emoji every time someone says something to do with fungus we need to have a bit of a switch on how we refer to it yeah I
think we do I think fungus is one of those really like strange things like we don't really know that much about it comparatively especially compared to like bacteria and viruses feel like we need more Mists to come to the four and tell us more and I guess this is where some of the research is going cuz it sounds like it is a relatively understudied thing in comparison to the bacteria which I guess is because the fungi are less widespread yeah I think there are only like certain types that
tend to infect people rather than the bacteria where it's it could be pretty much anything yeah and especially because bacteria I think can jump from oh I'm thinking viruses aren and I can jump from one species to another like with covid-19 oh the mutations over and over well bacteria do that too yeah yeah whereas fungi just tend to be they come out the environment and that's it they can't jump between creatures usually well maybe they can maybe that's what we're maybe that's what we don't know
that's why I ended that sentence with usually because I wouldn't want to say absolutely not because I don't know it's an unstudied thing yeah and also cuz we're finding out more and more about how the gut bacteria influence like uh mental health diseases and stuff and like whether certain bacteria present in your gut are like an indicator that you might have have Alzheimer's down the line or all these sorts of things or you can have inflammatory depression caused
by certain bacteria or like definitely compounded by bacteria and if you treat that with anti-inflammatories people see like a huge Improvement because effectively you've helped kill some of the things that's compounding your symptoms so I wonder then if you could treat it with a similar approach like if you could change the microbiota within you would you then have like less chance of developing a certain cancer in the first place and then I guess you'd have
to look at how far do you take it so I really like the idea of if you change something in your gut that can change your mental health for the good yeah imagine if all these people that are depressed and don't really have a reason for being depressed like they can't figure out what the source is it suddenly oh you just need to alter your gut bacteria start eating these foods have some kombucha suddenly people are a lot happier and that's all it took because of this incredibly detailed way
of understanding the human body and all the merried interactions of things that live in it yeah isn't that insane I it's still mindblowing to me if anyone wants to uh read a book about this the immune Mind by Dr ly Monty Lyman I interviewed him for work and he was absolutely fascinating but the his book is all about the interactions between the gut and the mind and mental health and he is a medical doctor so we can trust him much more than you can trust me and
Laura yeah so if M and Ellie's job is to interview the scientists that work on these things day in day out we can translate some of that information for you but go to the source for 100% this is what it is go to the source so yeah I guess then it comes on to treatment doesn't it if we kill the cancer are you killing the fungus or does it then Retreat back into wherever it came from is it the same fungus that was living peaceably in your gut the whole time before you got sick or is it like a
different mutation I guess funguses can mutate surely they must grow quite rapidly yeah they must evolve somehow so presumably but is it likely just is you removed the thing that it's been living in I think not we need to know more about the interactions I think like how interl are they is it just living there because it's a nice place to live or is it involved in the disease in a way that we didn't think it was my mind's sort of reeling with it well how would you
figure out what came first it's it's one of those chicken and egg things that science will eventually solve yeah I guess we if we only found out that this was a thing sort of late teens 201 teens then 20 years from now maybe we'll have much more of a clue about how it's all related reading into what is already out there on this there are a lot of articles that were really making the point that having fungi around isn't necessarily a problem you are not definitely going to get cancer because
there is this fungus somewhere and you should take drastic measures to avoid it they were very much saying it is nothing to be concerned by scientists are sciencing to figure out more though yeah it's the same thing isn't it we have 700 species of bacteria living in our mouths and that is not in inherently bad that's just the way the human body is but a good oral hygiene is important everyone so uh brush your teeth this gets on to a probably slightly different topic like the human
body is evolved to combat a whole different range of stuff constantly attacking it from the natural world right yeah and then humans decide that we're going to start applying all these cleaning products to everything and try and eradicate all this stuff that is perceived to be bad which just makes it worse sometimes yeah that's true if you're you know detto says wipes out 99.9% of bacteria that's fine I suppose but not necessarily all the bacteria we need to wipe out creates this
interesting thing is the the 1% that's left is that really resistant and then really hard to tackle or did you just not wipe behind the kettle probably more likely that to be honest but if it doesn't have those other bacteria and whatever else to compete with for resources it'll just get stronger and stronger and then you creating a problem I say clean less yeah that's the hot hot t take away from this episode clean less but do brush your teeth pretty much I mean there's
way more to go at with cancer and challenges around surrounding that cuz there are things to do with like genetic factors as well aren't there oh yeah I mean no cancer is just one treatment fits all everybody is going to respond differently to different treatments but I am going to keep an eye on this I feel like this is super interesting well I'm glad I could bring it to your attention and give you a new hobby yes thank you yeah I'm going to be silently reading uh
fungus and cancer paper for the next 10 years see what happens yeah or maybe at least the summaries cuz trying to read some of these papers I you you would really need to have studied it for years there is a lot of jargon that is my pet peeve with papers I don't need jargon if you tell me that you've discovered cuz I read a lot of animal papers and like dinosaur discoveries and all this sort of thing if you've tell me you've discovered a new species and it's got a
big head and the head is 2 m long just write that just write that one sentence that is all I need to know I don't need like measurements of the jaw and this that and the other and the orbits are twice as big as this other specimen you found 10 years ago I just I try to care I really do but I can't does kind of give people like us a job for life though of translating this um jargony stuff into something more engaging for a wider audience yeah that it literally is
my job so actually maybe I don't want the uh the one sentence summary and at the same time it would be nice to science were made more accessible in that way and I'm sure we'd still have PL work to do yes absolutely well you always find something to talk about well I think we've probably drifted off topic just enough seeing as I've managed to bring up dinosaurs in a fungus cancer episode but that has been absolutely fascinating I have learned many things that I did not know previously and I
think it's really cool that we have fungus living in our bodies and hopefully the more we look into new drugs the more we look into their relationship to cancers the better treatments can be made and sought out and tested and we'll find out more things all the time thank you very much for listening and we'll see you for our next episode The Views expressed in this podcast belong in t to the person that said them they did not represent any industry or organization if you enjoyed
listening to these views it would really help us out if you could rate US leave a review and tell a friend this podcast was sponsored by no one but if you're interested in funding us to continue to have Frank discussions about science and engineering please get in touch [Music]