SEMINAR: "Mechanisms of immune evasion by microbial pathogens"

Ana Traven obtained her PhD in 2002 from the University of Zagreb Croatia, followed by postdoctoral training at the St. Vincent’s Institute in Melbourne (2003-2008). In 2009, she was recruited to Monash University, where she is currently an Associate Professor and Head of the Laboratory for fungal pathogenesis.

The Traven lab studies how the human fungal pathogen Candida albicans evades immune destruction and resists antifungal drug attack. C. albicans causes systemic infections that have mortality as high as 40% even when antifungal therapy is administered. Ana and her team discovered new regulators of the formation of drug-resistant biofilms on medical surfaces (PLoS Genetics 2012 and PLoS Genetics 2015), demonstrated how Candida evades immunity by triggering programmed cell death of macrophages (mBio 2014 and mSphere 2016), and characterized metabolic regulation of antifungal drug susceptibility, including defining for the first time the mitochondrial biogenesis apparatus in a fungal pathogen thereby paving the way for combinatorial therapy (Mol Microbiol 2011, PNAS 2012). The lab has further collaborated with the CSIRO and the biotech company Hexima to characterize agents for future antimicrobial drug development (Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy 2016, Biomacromolecules 2013, Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy 2013). Work in the Traven lab has been supported by grants from the NHMRC, ARC and international funding from the Croatian Unity Through Knowledge Fund.