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A research group of graduate students at our Graduate School has established a new experimental model to evaluate the effectiveness of treatment for fungal keratitis at the tissue level.

A research group led by Tomoko Miyakubo (4th year Graduate School of Medicine) and Professor Koichi Makimura of the Institute for Medical Mycology, Teikyo Graduate School, has reported an ex vivo experimental model using pig corneas that allows for the evaluation of the effectiveness of antifungal drugs at the tissue level for fungal keratitis, a difficult-to-treat eye infection.

Fungal keratitis is an infection of the cornea caused by fungi such as filamentous fungi and yeasts, and in severe cases, it can lead to irreversible vision loss. Furthermore, a problem exists in that the results of drug susceptibility tests for antifungal drugs do not always correspond to the actual clinical effects. Conventional antifungal drug susceptibility tests mainly use conidia, which may not adequately reflect the drug effect on hyphae that grow in actual corneal tissue. Therefore, in this study, we worked to construct an experimental system that can evaluate the growth of fungi in corneal tissue and the effect of antifungal drugs.
Further investigations into different bacterial strains, antifungal agents, and drug concentrations are expected to lead to more accurate predictions of clinical therapeutic effects, evaluation of new antifungal agents, and even the development of new treatments for fungal keratitis.

The results of this research were published on August 5, 2026 (Wednesday) in "Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science August 2026, Vol.67, 13."

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