VCU Receives NIH Funding to Expand Study of the Vaginal Microbiome and its Relevance to Health and Disease

The National Institutes of Health has awarded Virginia Commonwealth University $8 million to expand the scope of an ongoing four-year study of how microorganisms found in the vagina influence health and disease in women.

The VCU project, which began in 2009, is one of eight across the country that competed for and won an additional three years of increased funding to expand work previously funded for the past 12 months.

The projects are part of the Human Microbiome Project, a $157 million, five-year effort launched in 2008 as part of the NIH Common Fund’s Roadmap for Medical Research. The project will produce a resource for researchers seeking to understand the function of the human microbiome in health and disease and to provide strategies to develop new therapies that manipulate the human microbiome to improve health.

The human microbiome comprises all the microorganisms that reside in or on the human body. It consists of beneficial and harmful microbes that include bacteria, viruses, fungi and other microbes.

Historically, microbes have been studied in the laboratory as cultures of isolated species. Microbial growth is dependent upon a very specific natural environment, and it is often difficult to duplicate these conditions in a laboratory. The novel and innovative technologies employed in these studies permit identification, characterization and quantification of microbes that comprise the complex mixtures found in and on our bodies without establishing them in culture. Bacteria, viruses, fungi and protozoa that have never before been identified or cultured can be identified, characterized and counted.

In 2009, the NIH funded 15 year-long pilot disease-oriented projects that sampled the microbiomes of volunteers with specific diseases or conditions that involve body sites thought to have a microbiome association. The body sites to be sampled included the digestive tract, the mouth, the skin, the nose, the vagina, the blood and the male urogenital tract. After one year, each pilot project was evaluated for additional funding based on progress toward milestones and the ability of each study to demonstrate a definable relationship between a body site microbiome and a specific disease.

“This award will help take our current research to the next level. It will allow us to confirm and extend our preliminary observations that link the composition of a woman’s vaginal microbiome to various disease states and conditions,” said Gregory Buck, Ph.D., director of the VCU Center for the Study of Biological Complexity and professor of microbiology and immunology in the VCU School of Medicine.

“The high throughput metagenomics approaches we employ are uncovering associations that were previously unknown and unexpected. The observations we have already made may have important implications for women’s health. They will be confirmed and extended in the upcoming three years of the project,” he said.

The four-year project brings together researchers from across VCU’s campuses from multiple disciplines to determine the contribution of a woman’s genes to the composition of her vaginal microbiome, how changes in the vaginal microbiome associated with resistance or susceptibility to infectious disease, and how the vaginal microbiome impacts altered physiological states related to pregnancy, preterm birth, metabolic diseases, vaginal infection and pain, and other non-infectious conditions.

Scientific review of the pilot demonstration projects was conducted to determine which studies would be awarded additional expanded funding based on several criteria, including: the potential of each study to achieve the goals of the disease demonstration program; its clinical significance; and which had the strongest scientific merit. Generally, the expansion of each study includes the additional recruitment of study volunteers, more in-depth sequence analyses of the human microbiomes of each participant’s samples, and more powerful statistical correlations with relevant disease states and conditions.

At VCU, there are teams of researchers from women’s health, microbial physiology, twin research, genetic sequencing/analysis, and data analysis. The study involves VCU’s advanced ‘next generation sequencing’ capabilities – powerful technologies used to sequence genomes of microorganisms.

Co-principal investigators on the grant are Jerome F. Strauss III, M.D., Ph.D., dean of the VCU School of Medicine, Cynthia Cornelissen, Ph.D., from the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, and Lindon Eaves, Ph.D., from the Department of Human and Molecular Genetics.

In addition to VCU, award funding went to Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, NYU School of Medicine, the National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Md., Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia, and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.