Canada's UAMH Centre for Global Microfungal Biodiversity Saved by $1 Million Donation
- Gauri Khanna
- 52 minutes ago
- 4 min read
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The UAMH Centre for Global Microfungal Biodiversity at the University of Toronto (home to nearly 12,000 living fungal specimens from over 3,200 species) was at risk of being shipped overseas due to lack of funding, until a $1-million donation from the Weston Family Foundation secured its future for at least five years.
About two-thirds of the strains in the collection exist nowhere else in the world; losing access to them would have delayed or halted research into new antibiotics, antifungal treatments, and emerging infectious diseases.
The collection has served Canadian and international researchers for more than 90 years, and plans are now underway to catalogue specimens online and build an endowment fund for long-term financial stability.
A $1-million private donation has kept North America's largest collection of medically important fungi on Canadian soil, buying time for a sustainable future. For most of 2024, the fate of one of North America's most scientifically significant biological archives was genuinely uncertain. The UAMH Centre for Global Microfungal Biodiversity, housed at the University of Toronto's Dalla Lana School of Public Health, had run out of funding. Its director, James Scott, had been keeping it going with personal funds: an arrangement that was plainly unsustainable. The realistic alternative was to transfer the entire collection to an institution abroad, such as the Westerdijk Fungal Biodiversity Institute in Utrecht, the Belgian Co-ordinated Collections of Micro-organisms, or the Institute of Microbiology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
A 90-Year-Old Collection Nearly Lost to Bureaucratic Borders
The prospect of relocation alarmed Canadian researchers. International regulations governing the movement of dangerous or rare biological specimens across borders, designed to prevent misuse of pathogens, mean that repatriating such materials once they have left the country is far from straightforward. In practice, many Canadian scientists would have found it difficult or impossible to access specimens they had previously relied upon. After CBC News reported on the biobank's predicament in late 2024, the Weston Family Foundation made contact, invited the centre to apply for a grant, and finalised a $1-million donation in January 2026.
What the Collection Actually Contains and Why It Is Difficult to Replace
The UAMH collection holds more than 11,750 living biospecimens representing over 3,200 species, making it the largest archive of public health-relevant microfungi in the western hemisphere. The specimens include emerging pathogens (disease-causing organisms whose prevalence is growing), opportunistic fungi that can cause serious illness in immunocompromised patients, and allergenic and toxigenic species. It is the only collection in Canada authorised to distribute medically important fungi for antifungal susceptibility testing, essentially, testing whether existing drugs can still kill a given fungus, and for developing and evaluating diagnostic tools.
Critically, approximately two-thirds of the strains are unique to this collection. There is no duplicate elsewhere. For researchers working on the next generation of antifungal compounds or tracing novel fungal pathogens, the collection represents an irreplaceable physical library. Fungi, unlike chemicals or reagents, cannot simply be ordered from a catalogue; biobanks are among the only mechanisms by which living microbial specimens can be preserved, maintained and distributed.
The collection also holds non-pathogenic strains of interest to agriculture and industry: organisms that produce compounds promoting plant health and soil resilience. Fungi's broader role in supporting ecosystems is increasingly recognised, and such reference collections are essential for tracking how those roles evolve under changing environmental pressures.
Fungi as Drug Candidates: A Renewed Urgency
One reason the collection's survival carries particular weight is the global antimicrobial resistance crisis. Fungi are among the most productive natural chemists known: historically responsible for penicillin, cyclosporine and other foundational medicines. With bacterial resistance to antibiotics growing and fungal infections becoming more prevalent in immunocompromised populations, including those undergoing chemotherapy or living with HIV, there is renewed scientific interest in fungi as a source of novel compounds.
Researchers using the UAMH collection have contributed to antibiotic discovery work and the study of emerging fungal pathogens whose geographic range is expanding as global temperatures rise. Climate change is already shifting where certain fungi can survive, introducing new species to regions with no established immunity or diagnostic protocols: a dynamic that makes having a comprehensive, accessible reference collection more valuable, not less.
Beyond Survival: Building Sustainability
Receiving the donation appears to have galvanised the institution. The University of Toronto has since committed to helping protect and grow the facility. The centre is now working to digitise its specimen catalogue and make it more accessible to researchers and commercial users, with the aim of increasing income from user fees. It is also exploring the creation of an endowed fund to cover operating costs independently of grant cycles.
The episode underlines a structural vulnerability common to specialised biological collections worldwide. Unlike chemical reagents that can be re-ordered at will, living microbial specimens cannot simply be recreated if lost. When the funding dries up, the organisms die—and with them, decades of scientific work. It is a fragility that sits uncomfortably beside the growing recognition of fungi's medical and environmental value, as reflected in efforts such as the UK Government's Fungal Conservation Strategy and the broader push to understand fungal diversity through cryopreservation and archiving techniques.
For now, the UAMH Centre has bought itself a second chance. Whether five years will be enough to build a funding model robust enough to outlast the next budget cycle remains the question that will define its future.
