Thanks to donor support, the biodiversity bank will remain in Canada at U of T

Mar 26, 2026

After years without funding support, it was feared in 2024 that the UAMH Centre for Global Microfungal Biodiversity at U of T’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health (DLSPH) would have to be moved abroad. But thanks to a generous donation from the Weston Family Foundation, the western hemisphere’s largest archive of public health-relevant microfungi will remain in Canada at its current location at U of T, with the goal to improve recovery revenue and seek sustainable funding sources to ensure its future security.

The biobank contains more than 11,750 living biospecimens representing 3,200 plus species, including emerging pathogens, opportunists, allergenic and toxigenic species.

This important, long-lasting collection would have been moved to a location outside of Canada such as Westerdijk Institute in Utrecht (Netherlands), Belgian Coordinated Collection of Microorganisms or the Institute of Microbiology (Chinese Academy of Sciences). Moving these collections outside of Canada would mean that access to species within the collection would have been made more difficult for Canadian researchers due to rules and regulations that differ from our own.

A globally significant resource

Thanks to the generous donation of $1 million from the Weston Family Foundation, it now has an opportunity to restructure its operations and seek critical permanent funding to remain in Canada where it has been accessed and used in research for more than 90 years by Canadian and international researchers.

We are grateful that DLSPH can continue to house this important resource, providing access to the largest collection of public health-relevant biospecimens available in North America.

“We are immeasurably pleased that this significant resource of disease-causing, medically and environmentally important, living microfungi can continue to be available for study in the years to come by both Canadian and international researchers who visit the collection. Moving the collection would have been an irrecoverable loss to Canadian science,” says Dr. James Scott, Director of the UAMH Centre for Global Microfungal Biodiversity.

We are grateful that DLSPH can continue to house this important resource, providing access to the largest collection of public health-relevant biospecimens available in North America.

The collection is the only one of its kind in Canada to distribute medically important fungi that can aid in the identification of potential new pathogens, test susceptibility to antifungal compounds and develop or evaluate diagnostic tests. It also contains an assortment of non-pathogenic organisms that produce chemical, medicinal or industrial compounds that promote healthy and robust agriculture.

DLSPH Dean Adalsteinn Brown says the implication of this biobank to the health of populations and our living environment is extensible. “The UAMH Centre for Global Microfungal Biodiversity is a globally important resource that can save lives through the identification of fungal diseases and production of potential medicinal compounds. We are grateful that DLSPH can continue to house this important resource, providing access to the largest collection of public health-relevant biospecimens available in North America.”

By Bonnie Sullivan