Seth Bloom, MD, PhD awarded a Global Grants Challenges Award

Seth Bloom, MD, PhD was awarded a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Global Grants Challenges Award for his work on Metabolite-Based Point-of-Care Diagnostics for Vaginal Microbiome Composition. With Margaret Kasaro, MBChB, MSc, he will validate metabolite biomarkers of clinically-relevant, vaginal microbiota community state types (CSTs) for development of diagnostics for research and clinical care. Different CSTs confer distinct risks for diseases linked to bacterial vaginosis, including risk of preterm birth and HIV infection. They will validate in a Zambian cohort the CST metabolite biomarkers that they previously identified in a South African cohort. They will grow pure cultures of individual bacteria to identify species and candidate enzymes responsible for vaginal CST biomarker production or consumption to inform development of a diagnostic assay. An inexpensive, real-time, point-of-care, diagnostic assay for use in low-resource settings would remove the need for slower, costlier DNA sequencing methods. Such a diagnostic test for vaginal microbiota-associated diseases will improve diagnosis, prediction of clinical risk, and monitoring of responses to therapy.