BME PhD Preliminary Exam Announcement for Damilola C. Lawore (D. Brubaker and L. Green, co-advisors)

Everyone is invited to attend the public presentation beginning at 2:30 PM.

Title: Characterizing the anticancer potential of vaginal microbes and metabolites.

Date: March 6, 2024

Time: 2:30 PM

Location: MJIS 2001

Thesis Committee members:

Dr. Douglas Brubaker, Ph.D. (Co-chair)

Dr. Leopold Green, Ph.D. (Co-chair)

Dr. Luis Solorio, Ph.D.

Dr. Quihong He, Ph.D.

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's 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 propose 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, we will analyze published vaginal microbiome multi-omics data and establish host vaginal epithelial gene and protein signatures linked to each profiled vaginal microbe/metabolite. We will first compare the established vaginal signatures to FDA-approved anticancer drug perturbation gene signatures to characterize the Anticancer Vaginal Pharmacobiome. Then we compare 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/metabolites with the potential to induce macrophage polarization. Finally, we will engineer a macrophage-bacterial symbiont, where we will embed bacteria in the macrophages, serving as therapeutic controllers against cancer cells. Overall, our proposed research endeavors to overcome the obstacle of lacking knowledge regarding the functions of various microbial species identified in the vaginal environment. This research would underscore the Pharmacobiome's potential in delineating the anticancer therapeutic aspects of vaginal microbiome constituents, with implications extending to diverse cancers, microbiomes, and disease contexts.