Fighting Fungal Infections with Less Collateral Damage

The more we learn about our microbiota—the teeming community of bacteria and fungi that inhabit us—the more complex it seems. Take one of the common fungi, Candida albicans, which can normally be found in our gastrointestinal (GI) tracts and on our skin. In healthy humans, too much of this fungus may only amount to a bothersome yeast infection.

But in at-risk patients, like those hospitalized or immunosuppressed, C. albicans can overgrow, move into the blood and spread throughout the body, resulting in a hard-to-diagnose and potentially fatal disease. Current treatments for fungal infections include a course of antifungal drugs, which can heighten the risk for additional infections and promote drug resistance.

Carol Kumamoto, a microbiologist at Tufts School of Medicine, has studied C. albicans for the past two decades. In 2015, she published a study, along with HNRCA nutrition scientist Alice H. Lichtenstein, that suggested that some dietary fats could reduce the colonization of C. albicans in the GI tract of mice.

C. albicans can also cause infection in preterm infants because of their immature immune systems. Seeking to extend her 2015 study, Kumamoto collaborated with Joseph Bliss, a physician at Women & Infants Hospital in Rhode Island, to study the effects of a dietary fat on preterm infants with Candida colonization.

Researchers supplemented the diet of seven preterm infants with medium chain triglyceride (MCT) oil, a safe-to-consume dietary fat currently used in low concentrations in infant formula. The team measured the level of fungi that grew in the infants’ GI tracts before, during, and after supplementation. The results were striking. The researchers found that supplementing formula with MCT oil reduced the fungus that can cause infections. The research was published last year in The Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal.

Tufts Now recently spoke to Kumamoto about the results and some of the surprising implications that this work has for understanding the balances of bacteria and fungi in our guts.