Sep 26, 2026 · 46 min · 16 segments
Vaginal microbiome research may offer new ways to understand infections, fertility, preterm birth and other areas of women’s health. Pita Navarro, co-founder and chief scientific officer of Evvy…
Pita NavarroGuest
Cynthia Gyamfi-BannermanHostI heard you ask a second.
Yeah.
Thank you.
So I'm really curious about, since the vaginal microbiome is constantly changing, these bacteria are commensal, they're coming in and out, and depending on your time of life, you're more likely to have one than the other.
Where do you see this treatment or this, I guess, decision support tool evolving to when we know that each time you measure someone, it might be completely different? Yeah, I
I think we... we're doing a lot of normalization, for example, like we have a lot of data around where they are in their menstrual cycle or whether they're in menopause or not in menopause and perimenopause.
For example, in the gut, it's really hard to make connections because you have so much diversity.
I would say that the vaginal microbiome is a lot more translational in that aspect because we want it to be dominated by lactobacilli.
And then we know that once you have diversity, then you are much more prone to these adverse health outcomes.
And so what we haven't really established before is Specifically, what pathogens lead to dysbiosis because we've leveraged 16S in the past, and so it's been at the genus level.
But now that we have metagenomics, we can actually start getting as close as possible to causation.
And I would say another big benefit that we have in our dataset is that we have actually about 10% of women come to us out of curiosity, meaning that they don't have symptoms and they don't have a history of health issues.
And so we're always measuring like the stability of the microbiome of someone who has recurrent infections or is, you know, very symptomatic versus someone who comes to us with no issues or no history of anything.
So I think a lot of it becomes just what are we seeing in the data? And are we seeing people change as often as we think? Or even from a demographic perspective, like I'm from Mexico.
Most of the research says that Inners is like going in and out of an infection.
But actually, like Hispanic women are more likely to be dominated by Inners and be in a stable condition.
So we do a lot of quantification using all the data points that we have to really understand.
I heard you ask a second.
Yeah.
Thank you.
So I'm really curious about, since the vaginal microbiome is constantly changing, these bacteria are commensal, they're coming in and out, and depending on your time of life, you're more likely to have one than the other.
Where do you see this treatment or this, I guess, decision support tool evolving to when we know that each time you measure someone, it might be completely different? Yeah, I
I think we... we're doing a lot of normalization, for example, like we have a lot of data around where they are in their menstrual cycle or whether they're in menopause or not in menopause and perimenopause.
For example, in the gut, it's really hard to make connections because you have so much diversity.
I would say that the vaginal microbiome is a lot more translational in that aspect because we want it to be dominated by lactobacilli.
And then we know that once you have diversity, then you are much more prone to these adverse health outcomes.
And so what we haven't really established before is Specifically, what pathogens lead to dysbiosis because we've leveraged 16S in the past, and so it's been at the genus level.
But now that we have metagenomics, we can actually start getting as close as possible to causation.
And I would say another big benefit that we have in our dataset is that we have actually about 10% of women come to us out of curiosity, meaning that they don't have symptoms and they don't have a history of health issues.
And so we're always measuring like the stability of the microbiome of someone who has recurrent infections or is, you know, very symptomatic versus someone who comes to us with no issues or no history of anything.
So I think a lot of it becomes just what are we seeing in the data? And are we seeing people change as often as we think? Or even from a demographic perspective, like I'm from Mexico.
Most of the research says that Inners is like going in and out of an infection.
But actually, like Hispanic women are more likely to be dominated by Inners and be in a stable condition.
So we do a lot of quantification using all the data points that we have to really understand.
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