The link between smoking tobacco and changes in the oral microbiome in response to tobacco smoking are well established. It is not known if there are changes in response to electronic cigarettes (e-cig). These changes in the microbiome are associated with increased numbers of disease causing pathogens. Currently there are no published studies that have investigated the relationship of smoking tobacco on both the oral and lung microbiome. There is insufficient evidence showing whether changes in oral cavity and lung microbiome are also seen in e-cig users. We will study the oral cavity and lung of non-smokers, smokers and e-cig users to examine concordance between oral cavity and the lungs as well as comparing the three groups, examining the microbiomes and expression of inflammatory markers. We hypothesize that microbial dysbiosis and expression of inflammatory cytokines will differ for smokers and non-smokers; and that e-cig users will have microbial dysbiosis similar to cigarette smokers. A cross-sectional study is being conducted on three groups, 1) never-smokers, 2) cigarette smokers, and 3) e-cig users. For each study participant, saliva and bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) are being collected to measure microbiome. RNA is extracted from saliva and BAL samples for total transcriptome analysis using RNA-seq. This analysis will detect human and bacterial reads thereby allowing observations of bacterial communities as well as human inflammatory cytokine response to bacterial presence. 85% to 98% of BAL sample reads aligned to the human genome compared to less than 50% from saliva samples. The alignment results allow us to deduce that the majority of reads from BAL samples are human and that the majority of the reads in saliva samples are bacterial.

Preliminary results show detection of human RNA expression and of bacterial reads are present in both saliva and BAL samples. More samples are being processed and the comparison of BAL and saliva samples between the three groups will be discussed.

Citation Format: Kevin Ying, Min-Ae Song, Daniel Y. Weng, Quentin Nickerson, David Frankhouser, Pearlly S. Yan, Ralf Bundschuh, Mark D. Wewers, Ewy Mathé, Jo L. Freudenheim, Peter G. Shields. Assessing microbial dysbiosis of electronic cigarettes and cigarette smokers using oral and lung microbiome [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2017; 2017 Apr 1-5; Washington, DC. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2017;77(13 Suppl):Abstract nr 246. doi:10.1158/1538-7445.AM2017-246

©2017 American Association for Cancer Research.
2017
American Association for Cancer Research.