Welcome to Fungal Diagnostics Laboratory Consortium (FDLC) website!

Our Mission Statement

The mission of the Fungal Diagnostics Laboratory Consortium is to promote research collaboration across centers that will support 1) the development and evaluation of new methods for improving the diagnosis of fungal diseases, 2) the identification and detection of new fungal pathogens, and 3) the collaboration on antifungal drug resistant detection and new drug development.

Background

The incidence of fungal infection is on the rise and it has become a bigger threat to our patient population, especially transplant/oncology patients. The diagnosis of invasive fungal infection is often delayed, and current methodologies are not always adequate. Less progress for fungal diagnosis has been made in the last decade than has been made in bacterial and viral infection diagnosis. Some sporadic efforts have been reported but most of these attempts were at the individual institution level and didn’t reach a stage where a consensus guideline could be generated to improve fungal diagnostic testing and patient clinical outcome. The idea of bringing together clinical laboratories who routinely provide diagnostic mycology services to form a laboratory network for fungal diagnostics is proposed. The network would allow laboratories to join forces to facilitate and accelerate research and development to improve and enhance fungal diagnostics. The network would also promote collaboration with industry partners to support new assay development and commercialization as well as to accelerate the process for clinical validation and laboratory implementation.