# Discovery of bacterial consortia to treat recurrent vulvovaginal candidiasis: a generalizable platform for phenotypic microbial community screening

> **NIH NIH R43** · CONCERTO BIOSCIENCES · 2022 · $299,907

## Abstract

Vulvovaginal candidiasis (VVC), a vaginal infection characterized by vulval itching, inflammation, and lesions,
affects 1.4 million American women per year. VVC is primarily caused by Candida albicans, a fungus that
switches from a commensal yeast form to a pathogenic hyphal form in response to microbiome perturbations
such as antibiotics. While antifungals treat many VVC episodes, 20% of diagnosed women experience
recurrent VVC, suggesting that maintaining long-lasting health requires restoration of a protective vaginal
microbiome, not just eradication of a pathogen. A defined consortium of vaginal-derived microbes could restore
lost microbiome functions—broad colonization of vaginal niches and production of fungal inhibitors such as
surfactants and lactic acid—to resist subsequent blooms of C. albicans and prevent recurrent VVC.
Nevertheless, generating an optimal therapeutic consortium requires a thorough understanding of how
microbial strains function in combination, an outstanding challenge in microbiology that cannot yet be
answered from metagenomic information alone. High-throughput screening (HTS) could reveal microbial
consortia that perform specific desirable functions; however, the complex liquid handling necessary to
construct and measure millions of microbial communities has prevented practical use of this strategy. Concerto
Biosciences solves this problem using kChip, a novel HTS platform that can construct and measure ~500,000
defined microbial combinations per day, and can be leveraged to perform direct functional assays of millions of
combinations during a screening campaign. In this Phase I proposal, Concerto proposes to perform a kChip
screen of 10M multistrain combinations of vaginal-derived microbes to directly identify consortia that suppress
C. albicans growth and hyphae formation, hallmarks of VVC. We aim to (1) build a biobank of bacterial strains
derived from healthy donors’ vaginal samples that can form the basis of designed microbial consortia, (2)
develop quantitative measures of C. albicans growth and hyphae formation in a kChip screening context, and
(3) identify strain combinations that suppress C. albicans growth and hyphae formation across multiple
environments, including vaginal extracts. The top consortia identified by this screen will undergo additional
development—the subject of a future Phase II proposal—to generate a lead consortium therapeutic. This
therapeutic will represent the first defined, multistrain microbiome restoration therapeutic in women’s health
with the potential to safely and effectively ameliorate recurrent VVC of millions of Americans. More broadly,
successful implementation of kChip-enabled discovery will fuel rapid discovery of treatments for other fungal
(seborrheic dermatitis and mucormycosis) and vaginal (bacterial vaginosis, preterm birth, and STI
transmission) diseases.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10383360
- **Project number:** 1R43AI167131-01
- **Recipient organization:** CONCERTO BIOSCIENCES
- **Principal Investigator:** Jared Scott Kehe
- **Activity code:** R43 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2022
- **Award amount:** $299,907
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2022-07-01 → 2023-06-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10383360

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10383360, Discovery of bacterial consortia to treat recurrent vulvovaginal candidiasis: a generalizable platform for phenotypic microbial community screening (1R43AI167131-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10383360. Licensed CC0.

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