Thanks a lot for playing and for the feedback!
I also really like the idea of being able to fight back against the mold! I realized that during late stages of balancing, but could not come up with a satisfying solution in time. I was a bit stuck on wanting a highscore system, while keeping the coins in the game - I did not think of using them as another research/upgrade currency and using something else as highscore metric. I really like your idea of utilizing the coins for persistent upgrades, thank you! Maybe I'll implement this after the jam, changing the highscores to something time-based.