Eleftherios Mylonakis

Eleftherios Mylonakis is a physician-scientist, and his work focuses on the study of microbial pathogenesis and drug discovery. His research has developed a novel alternative to studying bacterial and fungal infection and host responses: the use of invertebrate model hosts. These surrogate invertebrate hosts fill an important niche in fungal pathogenesis research. His investigations have identified novel virulence factors, cross kingdom pathogen-pathogen interactions, novel antifungal agents, and evolutionarily conserved traits that are involved in host virulence and immune responses during infection. Recently, Dr. Mylonakis implemented high-throughput whole-animal Caenorhabditis elegans assay to screen libraries of chemical compounds and identify those with antimicrobial activity. In vivo evaluation of libraries of chemical compounds could solve some of the main obstacles in current antifungal discovery, such as finding new classes of compounds and solving the bottleneck of toxicity/efficacy testing. This approach challenges the position that studies in fungal pathogenesis should focus on the analysis of the "host," the "pathogen," or the "antimicrobial compound." Dr. Mylonakis has published over 150 articles in the scientific literature, and peer-reviewed grants from the National Institutes of Health and private foundations have supported his studies. He is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the journal Virulence and serves on the editorial boards of many publications and as an ad hoc reviewer for over 40 journals.