BME PhD Defense Announcement for Damilola C. Lawore (D. Brubaker and L. Green, Co-Advisors)

Everyone is invited to attend the public presentation beginning at 2:00 PM.

Title: Characterizing the anticancer potential of vaginal microbes and metabolites

Date: November 10, 2025

Time: 2:00 PM

Location: MJIS 2001 and Zoom

https://purdue-edu.zoom.us/j/92271358202?pwd=8iNS3dnaR678EyMDczNc4iaNhewBWV.1&from=addon

Thesis Committee members:

Dr. Douglas Brubaker (Co-chair)

Dr. Leopold Green (Co-chair)

Dr. Luis Solorio

Dr. Quihong He

Abstract:

The vaginal microbiome plays a crucial role in the risk, progression, and treatment of female cancers, yet our understanding of its complex dynamics remains incomplete. There is a pressing need to develop systematic approaches to unravel how vaginal microbiome components and their products interact with host cells, particularly regarding their therapeutic potential. In response, we developed the Pharmacobiome, a systems biology framework that quantitatively assesses the similarity between vaginal microbes/products and known drugs/small molecules based on their impact on host cellular responses. To test this framework, we analyzed published vaginal microbiome multi-omics data and established host vaginal epithelial gene and protein signatures linked to each profiled vaginal microbe and metabolite. We first compared the established vaginal signatures to FDA-approved anticancer drug perturbation gene signatures to characterize the Anticancer Vaginal Pharmacobiome. We then compared the established host vaginal epithelial gene and protein signatures to the gene expression profiles associated with human monocyte-to-macrophage polarization to identify vaginal microbes and metabolites with the potential to induce macrophage polarization. Our comparative transcriptomic analysis revealed that specific vaginal bacteria, including Streptococcus agalactiae, Atopobium, and Lactobacillus species, demonstrate significant overlap with M1 macrophage polarization signatures, while others including Bifidobacterium pseudolongum and Lactobacillus crispatus align with immune downregulation patterns. Furthermore, metabolomic profiling identified trimethylamine-N-oxide, hydroxyproline, and hexose as key metabolites that directly modulate macrophage cytokine production in vitro, confirming their immunomodulatory capacity. Overall, this research overcomes the obstacle of lacking knowledge regarding the functions of various microbial species identified in the vaginal environment. This work underscores the Pharmacobiome's potential in delineating the immunomodulatory and anticancer therapeutic aspects of vaginal microbiome constituents, with implications extending to diverse cancers, microbiomes, and disease contexts.