Join leading clinician-scientists, translational investigators, and industry partners for the first IISFD meeting focused on accelerating host-directed and immune-based therapies for invasive fungal diseases, and building the global community needed to move the field from promising isolated efforts to coordinated discovery and pragmatic clinical impact. 

Invasive fungal diseases remain associated with unacceptably high morbidity and mortality despite advances in antifungal drugs, in large part because most cases occur in hosts with impaired or dysregulated immunity. IISFD was created to catalyze a new era in which immunotherapy becomes a routine, evidence-based adjunct to antifungal therapy, tailored to the patient’s immune status and the evolving host pathogen interaction. Building on the momentum of recent international discussions and the growing therapeutic arsenal in modern biomedicine, such as monoclonal antibodies, cytokines, small-molecule immunomodulators, engineered immune cells, and next-generation vaccines.

This inaugural meeting will bring together pre-clinical and clinical communities to define priorities, share emerging data, and create collaborative pathways for translation. IISFD’s goals includes advancing innovative immunotherapeutic strategies, promoting host-directed interventions, enabling knowledge-sharing and education, and supporting cross-sector collaborative research and development. Central themes will include immune profiling to guide therapy, adaptive and pragmatic trial design in rare and heterogeneous fungal diseases, and conceptual frameworks (e.g., immune balance and damage-response thinking) that help clinicians decide when to enhance immunity versus dampen injurious inflammation.