For Researchers | Malassezia Foundation

WE'RE HIRING PhD GRADUATES & POSTDOCS!

The Malassezia Foundation is looking for recent PhD graduates (or soon graduating PhD students) for positions as postdocs in Canadian university research labs studying Malassezia. Experience in immunology, microbial genetics and/or microbiology is required. Please send us a brief message outlining your expertise, interest, current occupation and availability using the form below.

STARTING A NEW PROJECT

If you are a researcher currently working or planning to work on topics related to our main areas of interest, there are many ways in which we can help you advance your projects.

To give you a taste of what we’re interested in, here’s a list of projects we are either currently collaborating on or planning:

Histological and microbiomic studies to confirm the presence of Malassezia in affected organs in humans and animal models, for example in the substantia nigra of Parkinson’s patients;

Human and animal studies to test the efficacy of antifungal drugs at reducing Malassezia loads in different tissues;

Clinical trials to test the efficacy of antifungal drugs in treating Crohn’s disease and pancreatic cancer;

Studies to evaluate humoral and cellular immunoreactivity against Malassezia antigens in diseases where immunoreactivity against fungal antigens has been demonstrated, for example:

Spondyloarthritis (Maillet 2016)
Acute anterior uveitis (Cozon 2008; Maillet 2016)
Crohn’s disease (Main 1988; Limon 2019)
Psoriasis (Lober 1982; Squiquera 1994; Kanda 2002)
Seborrheic dermatitis (Neuber 1996)

Although we mainly focus on Canada and North America, we are open to collaborating with researchers from all over the world and we can provide funding as well as practical expertise on areas such as bioinformatics (metagenomics). If you’d like to have more information on our in-house research activities, please read the “Support Services” section below.

If you’d like to submit a project to us, please fill out the form below and we will get back to you quickly.

SUPPORT SERVICES

The Malassezia Foundation performs in-house research to enable complex projects led by academic research groups. Collaborating groups typically have one main expertise (for example immunology), and have not worked with Malassezia in the past. The Foundation provides direct support in two key areas: experimental design and microbiome analysis.

Experimental design

Malassezia’s role in diseases of internal organs has just come to light. Research groups focusing on specific diseases (for example Crohn’s disease) are often not yet familiar with Malassezia. Which strains or antigens should be used in experiments? Which antifungal drugs are most effective? What types of antibodies should be tested? How should microbiome specimens be collected, stored and processed?

The Malassezia Foundation’s team has done experimental design with many research groups in the past, and can greatly accelerate this process while minimizing risks for new projects.

Microbiome analysis

The Malassezia Foundation has extensive expertise in microbiome analysis (Laurence 2020). Many studies of Malassezia’s putative role in disease need to accurately measure the microbial load in human or animal tissues. This task requires specialized sequencing library preparation to avoid contamination and increase detection sensitivity.

The Malassezia Foundation collaborates with researchers to conduct studies combining immunology, histology, pharmacology and microbiome analysis. Specialized bioinformatics tasks are performed by the Malassezia Foundation itself to complement the expertise of collaborating research groups.